Chapter 594 — Thirty Minutes in a Cave

CHAPTER 594

Thirty Minutes in a Cave

The river threw them out at dawn.

One moment there was black water and a stone roof scraping Shi Feng’s skull. The next, grey light hit his eyes, and the current spat them over a lip of rock into a cold pool under a cliff.

He came up coughing, with Ji Yuanhe still tied to his back by a strip of his own robe. He waded to the shingle and laid the old man down.

“Master Ji,” Shi Feng said, pushing the wet white hair out of the old man’s eyes. “We’re out. You can count as loud as you like now. Nobody’s listening anymore.”

Ji Yuanhe didn’t count.

His lips moved, but no number came. His eyes went left, then right, then left again. Then his hands came up and clawed at his ears.

“Four hundred,” Ji Yuanhe whispered. “Four. Seven. Hundred. One. One. One…”

Shi Feng’s heart sank.

Ji Yuanhe had used the count to endure a year of captivity. In the last weeks, the machine had shared that rhythm. Now it was three li behind them, under rock and water, and the old man couldn’t find the next number alone.

Shi Feng pressed two fingers to his brow and examined him with Spirit Sense. The old man’s soul had cracks everywhere. More of it was leaking away while Shi Feng searched for something he could hold together.

A day at most, Shi Feng judged. Probably less.

Misfortunes never come singly, the saying went. Right on time, hooves sounded on the bank.

Four riders came round the bend on grey scaled horses, wearing plain travelling coats. Two of them carried the heavy, settled aura of Soul Formation.

“The water drains out here!” the front rider shouted. “Check the shingle!”

“Nothing on the shingle!” the second rider called back.

“Then check the cliff,” the front rider said.

“With a madman on his back?” the third rider laughed. “Nobody climbs that.”

Shi Feng was already climbing.

He went up on Cloud Ladder Step, one rung of qi under each foot, with Ji Yuanhe dragging at his shoulders. Thirty zhang up, the rock leaned out over his head in a sheer, smooth overhang. There was nothing to hold and nothing to push from.

At Minor Success, his airborne footholds lasted briefly. He’d never made them carry him along the underside of an overhang.

Shi Feng stepped anyway.

The rung formed under his boot upside down. Then the next, and the next. He walked out along the underside of the overhang, and halfway across, the art turned over in his legs and settled. The ladder didn’t need a wall. It only needed a next step.

Cloud Ladder Step had reached Major Success.

Most Golden Core cultivators never got that art past Minor Success in their whole lives. He’d done it upside down, soaking wet, with an old man on his back and four hunters underneath.

Shi Feng was astonished by the advance, but he couldn’t stop to celebrate it. Four hunters still waited below, and Ji Yuanhe needed more than a place to hide.

Above the overhang was a dry cave full of old swallow nests. He laid Ji Yuanhe on the driest patch of sand.

The sack of looted herbs held two hundred thousand stones’ worth of Soul Formation-grade stock. Nearly all of it was fierce enough to burn a cracked old soul to ash.

At the bottom, wrapped in oiled paper, was one jar of Quiet Dew.

A Soul-Steadying Pill normally needed seven herbs and a bronze furnace. Shi Feng had one herb and a cave. That had to be enough to try. Waiting for proper supplies would leave him carrying a dead man.

He cut a bowl into the cave floor with the grey Sword, three cuts and a scrape. Then he sat cross-legged in front of Ji Yuanhe and put on his shop-counter voice.

“Welcome, honoured guest,” Shi Feng said warmly. “You’re my first customer outside the Pit. Today’s special is the Soul-Steadying Pill. The usual recipe has seven herbs. We have one. The usual furnace is bronze. Ours is a rock. Don’t worry, the price is the same as always. You keep breathing.”

Ji Yuanhe’s eyes rolled toward his voice.

“Step one,” Shi Feng said, and poured the dew into the stone bowl. “That’s one. Say it with me.”

“…One,” Ji Yuanhe whispered.

“Step two, a low fire,” Shi Feng said, raising a small flame beneath the bowl. “Lower than you’d like. That’s two.”

“Two,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shi Feng counted every step aloud, and every step became a number. Three was the dew turning cloudy. Four was its cool qi rising. Seven was him folding that qi back into the bowl so none escaped. The old man held on to each number and waited for the next.

Down on the shingle, the riders were still arguing.

“Is that smoke?” the second rider asked.

“It’s mist off the pool, idiot,” the front rider snapped. “Downriver. Move!”

The hooves faded.

Thirty minutes after the dew went in, the bowl hissed. Two thin white clouds gathered under the cave roof, and the third never came. In the bottom of the bowl sat a pale grey pill the size of a pea.

Common. Two clouds.

If Appraiser Mei saw that, she’d log it as slag, Shi Feng thought, and grinned. But it was whole.

He put the pill between Ji Yuanhe’s lips and followed its qi with Spirit Sense. Coolness covered the cracked soul, holding the leaking edges closed. Shi Feng was relieved but didn’t mistake it for a cure. The damage remained beneath the seal.

A month, Shi Feng judged. Then another pill, and another after that, for as long as it took to find a real cure.

“That’s one jar of Quiet Dew on your account,” Shi Feng said cheerfully. “Pay me when you can remember what day it is.”

Ji Yuanhe’s eyes stopped moving.

“One,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Then, after exactly the right space, Ji Yuanhe said, “Two.”

Then Ji Yuanhe said, “Three.”

Each number took the same time as the one before. He didn’t stop. He never stopped again. Ji Yuanhe counted aloud for the rest of his life.

Shi Feng leaned back against the stone, and then he felt it. Three months of devoured slag sat packed in the Reservoir, full to the brim, and the Nascent Soul was pushing at its walls. In the Pit, an aura change would have been a confession, so every night he’d held it down with both hands.

There was nobody here to confess to.

Shi Feng crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and opened the door.