Chapter 591 — The Vault

CHAPTER 591

The Vault

The bucket line shuffled on past the vault. Shi Feng stepped out of it.

Kong Ba looked at the old man on his back, then at the bulging sack on his chest. For a moment, the Overseer of Hall Two clearly couldn’t work out what he was seeing.

Then he worked it out.

“You?” Kong Ba said. “The shaking chick?”

“Good evening, Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng said politely. He didn’t stammer. “The fire rule’s a good rule. I’m sorry it brought you here.”

Kong Ba’s face went from red to purple.

“A white-eyed wolf!” Kong Ba roared. “Three months I fed you! Three months I said you were lucky!”

“You fed me slag, Overseer,” Shi Feng said. “I ate every bite. I’d call that even.”

“Even?” Kong Ba shouted. He stepped back into the vault and jerked his head. “Get in here. I don’t need a single guard to squash one chick.”

Kong Ba wanted the credit for himself. Shi Feng followed him inside before anyone in the bucket line looked back.

Shi Feng walked into the vault.

The walls were grey spirit-eating stone, the same as his cell, and his Spirit Sense went flat against it at once. It would be fists and eyes only.

Kong Ba was early Soul Formation. His right palm rose, wrapped in roaring red fire qi. He’d beaten men to death in rooms like this before.

The palm came straight at Shi Feng’s chest to kill.

Shi Feng didn’t dodge. With Ji Yuanhe on his back, he couldn’t. He lifted his own palm and met it.

The fire hit his hand and disappeared.

The All-Devouring Physique opened. Kong Ba’s qi poured into Shi Feng’s palm, up his arm and into his meridians. Shi Feng didn’t fight it. He folded it, the way he’d folded a hundred furnace flames, and laid it along the meridian of his right leg.

Kong Ba’s eyes went wide. He pushed harder. The fire kept vanishing.

“What... what is this?” Kong Ba gasped.

“Your qi,” Shi Feng said helpfully. “Thank you.”

He kicked.

The kick drove Kong Ba’s fire into his own belly and hurled him against a shelf. Boxes fell over him. He’d lost to an early Nascent Soul and still couldn’t understand where his attack had gone.

Kong Ba slid to the floor, staring up at the boy with the old man on his back. His mouth worked.

“You ate the pit...” Kong Ba said.

Then his eyes rolled up, and he was out.

“Four hundred and eighty-four,” Ji Yuanhe said into Shi Feng’s collar.

“That was a quick one, Master Ji,” Shi Feng agreed.

A spirit stone had rolled out of Kong Ba’s belt pouch. Shi Feng picked it up and put it in his sleeve. He didn’t count it as wages. It was for somebody else.

His ring was on the third shelf, lying flat on a square of grey cloth with a number beside it in Ning Zhe’s neat small hand.

Shi Feng slid it onto his finger. It felt warmer than it should have.

He checked the ring: Slag Weight, Volume One, one hundred and twelve receipts, his father’s folded diagram, the blue cloak and the empty violet pouch. He took the grey Sword from beside the ring and stored it too.

Stones to the division’s account, Shi Feng thought. I’ll bill the division later.

The herb case sat beside the ring, all eleven compartments. Next to it lay a stub of chalk and a green paper, folded twice, with TERMS written on it in his own hand. He tucked both into his left sleeve, where they belonged.

Shi Feng tucked them safely away.

He emptied the sack into the ring, then his sleeves, then the knot in his robe. For the first time in three months, he stood up straight.

The gap where line forty-two should have been was a bare stretch of shelf. Nothing lay there. He’d known that already. He looked at it anyway, once.

Then he looked at the next shelf down, and stopped.

A small, lumpy bundle in oiled paper sat at the back, where somebody too lazy to throw out rubbish had shoved it.

Shi Feng picked it up and unwrapped it.

It was Lin Langtian’s sweet potato. Three months in a dry vault had shrunk it to a hard, wrinkled brown lump.

Shi Feng stared at it. Then he laughed under his breath.

“Look at you,” Shi Feng told it. “They took my ring, my stones and my sleeves, and nobody wanted you. You outlasted a whole Pit, and you didn’t even have to pretend to shake.”

The potato stayed silent. Lin Langtian had given it to him for the road. Shi Feng held it carefully.

For the road, Lin had said. Don’t eat it unless you need to.

Shi Feng thought about the cold flue, the river, the wardens and the long way home. He decided this counted.

He bit into it. It tasted of dust and reminded him of Lin Langtian shouting prices outside the stall. Shi Feng ate it among the shelves, comforted by something his captors hadn’t valued enough to throw away.

He dropped the oiled paper on the shelf. Let them find that.

Ji Yuanhe’s chin rested on his shoulder.

“Four hundred and eighty-five,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“Yes. Time to go,” Shi Feng said.

He stepped over Kong Ba and out of the vault, and turned toward the stair that led down to the old halls.

A man was standing on it.

He was broad, with a jaw like a block of iron, a captain’s black cord on the shoulder of his grey coat, a long sword at his hip and a bone whistle at his throat. The fire rule had sent him here too.

Guard Captain Yu Tieshan looked at the old man on Shi Feng’s back, then at the overseer’s boots sticking out of the vault door.

“So,” Yu Tieshan said. “Your furnace wasn’t tired after all.”