Chapter 590 — The Overloaded Batch

CHAPTER 590

The Overloaded Batch

The fourteenth herb went in, and the furnace began to hum.

It was a low, sick sound. The lid rattled once. Shi Feng put his palm flat on it and fed the fire a little more.

Five herbs made an Ember Blood Pill. Fourteen made a problem.

Across the hall, Kong Ba snored on his bucket. Clerk Shu counted. Through the arch, the little wax hammer kept Ji Yuanhe’s rhythm, and the old man’s lips moved over the numbers.

Then the shift bell rang. Two flat strokes.

At every corner of the Pit, the old guards walked off and the fresh ones hadn’t arrived yet. For a few dozen breaths, nobody stood anywhere.

Shi Feng took his hand off the lid.

Boom!

Fire and black smoke burst through a split in the furnace and struck the ceiling. The ward plates flared white as they absorbed the blast. Instead of shaking the mountain, it became a dull thump beneath the workers’ feet. Shi Feng watched the plate above him swell.

The wardens at the outer gate listened to the Pit’s count, not its furnaces. The count hadn’t stopped.

“Fire!” Kong Ba roared, falling off his bucket. “Fire rule! Officers to the vault! Somebody get to the herb room! Captives, buckets, now!”

The fire rule sent officers to protect the vault and herb room from thieves. Shi Feng had relied on their obedience. While Kong Ba shouted the familiar orders, the weighing corridor was still empty.

He had to reach the shelves before the officers did. Shi Feng moved as soon as he heard the first men answer Kong Ba.

The weighing corridor’s door was six paces from station nine. He was through it before Kong Ba had found his feet.

The key-slip turned. The grille swung open.

Shi Feng didn’t take the jars. He took what was in them.

He emptied the left shelves into the sack hidden in his robe, returning each jar with its lid on and tag hanging straight. When the sack filled, he packed his sleeves. Then he tied his robe’s hem and filled that. He kept moving until every jar stood empty.

Sixty breaths. Two hundred and twelve jars.

He did the sum on the way to the grille, and it made him dizzy with joy. Seven hundred liang of fire root, the frost sap, forty lots of marrow moss. Roughly two hundred thousand stones of Soul Formation-grade stock, walking out of the house on a mule boy’s back.

Three months of quota, and they’d never paid me a single stone, Shi Feng thought. Now the house has settled its account all at once. How generous.

[Looted: Soul Formation-grade herbs | Value: roughly 200,000 | Note: three months’ wages, settled in full.]

On the grille he hung one last tag. He’d carved the stamp from a turnip last night, copying the wax, and inked it from Clerk Shu’s tray this morning.

USED: ALL. REPLACE.

Senior Brother would have left a thank-you note, Shi Feng thought, pleased. This was nearly one.

He didn’t leave a bill. Even he had limits, though not many.

Boots were coming up the corridor. He went the other way.

Hall Two was a cave full of smoke.

Captives coughed and stumbled toward the cistern with buckets. Somebody had already formed a line, and water slopped from hand to hand toward the split furnace. Kong Ba was gone. The fire rule had taken him to the vault, as it took every officer.

Mei Han stood by the far table with her sleeve over her mouth, staring at the broken furnace, not at the people.

“My furnace!” a captive moaned, passing a bucket. “When the city gate burns, the fish in the moat suffer. Who blew it?”

“The frontier boy’s,” another coughed. “Of course it was.”

Shi Feng ducked behind his own wreck. The residue was still smoking in the cracked bowl, a black crust full of nine herbs too many. He scooped it out with both hands and ate it hot.

Then he looked up at the ward plate over station nine.

The plate above his wreck was dark grey and swollen. An appraiser could read the force of the blast from what it had absorbed. Shi Feng couldn’t leave proof that this furnace held more than a nervous boy’s accidental mistake.

He reached up, pried it off its pins and bit into it.

It tasted of old bronze and went down like a fistful of nails. His stomach clenched so hard he nearly sat down in the ash, and he knew at once that he’d be paying for this mouthful for a week.

He couldn’t leave even a corner of that evidence. Shi Feng kept chewing despite the pain and watched the arch for anyone approaching.

He swallowed the last corner and wiped his mouth.

Through the arch, Ji Yuanhe was still counting. Shi Feng crouched at the black furnace and gave the cord one tug. The last thread parted without a sound.

“Up you get, Master Ji,” Shi Feng murmured.

The old man weighed almost nothing. Shi Feng took him on his back, hung the herb sack in front, picked up a bucket and stepped into the line.

Behind him, the little wax hammer went on keeping time beside an empty stool.

Nobody in a bucket line ever looked up. Mei Han was still staring at the furnace.

“Four hundred and eighty-three,” Ji Yuanhe whispered into his collar.

“Good,” Shi Feng whispered back. “Keep going.”

The line wound out of the smoke and down the cistern corridor. It passed the catalogue vault, where the Pit kept everything it had ever taken.

The vault door was open.

Kong Ba stood in it, his tongs in his hand, staring straight at the boy with an old man on his back.