Chapter 598 — Wanhe

CHAPTER 598

Wanhe

“Eight sects!” the silk merchant said, holding up eight fat fingers. “Eight orthodox sects hold up the Empire, and every one of them is bigger than your whole frontier!”

It was the third evening on the barge. The grain sacks smelled of dust and river water, and the passengers had gathered round the stern lantern to drink Mou Dagui’s sour wine. The silk merchant was from Wanhe, and he’d been talking since the first day.

Shi Feng sat on a sack with Ji Yuanhe beside him, looking like a beggar who’d never heard of anything.

“Which are they, uncle?” Shi Feng asked humbly.

“The Azure Sun Sect, for flame and pills,” the silk merchant said, counting. “Thunder Abyss Valley, where they shout lightning at each other. Cangming Sword Palace. The Great Compassion Temple. The Tianji Mansion, which reads your fortune and charges extra for the bad news. And three more that a country boy doesn’t need to know.”

“And the ones in the mountains?” a young porter asked, lowering his voice. “The ones who took the alchemist from my uncle’s village last spring? People say it was the Heretic Sect.”

The whole stern went quiet.

“Say bandits,” Mou Dagui said flatly, from the tiller. “On my barge, you say bandits.”

“Bandits,” the porter said quickly.

Heretic Sect. Shi Feng remembered the name without reacting. The people in the mountain called themselves Heavenly Sect. Outside it, even a porter afraid for his uncle’s village used the other name quietly.

“Forty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said.

The silk merchant cleared his throat and went on more loudly, glad to change the subject.

“The real power in Wanhe isn’t swords, anyway. It’s Marks,” the silk merchant said. “A 3 Mark in my city is a man who sells pills on a corner. A 4 Mark gets a carriage. And a 6 Mark…” He leaned in. “There are old monsters above Shattering Void that nobody names in a teahouse. When a 6 Mark walks into a hall, even they stand up.”

Profound Heaven, Shi Feng thought. Mo had a name for it. These people don’t even say it.

“A 3 Mark sells pills on a corner?” Shi Feng asked, wide-eyed.

“On a corner!” the silk merchant said, delighted to have impressed someone. “Your frontier is a puddle, little brother. Beyond the heavens there’s another heaven.”

Shi Feng only smiled and bowed his head.

The youngest 3 Mark on the Pavilion’s records would sell pills on a corner here. Shi Feng accepted the lesson without arguing. He needed to know how Wanhe worked more than he needed this merchant to admire him.

“Fifty,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Over the next days, the gossip went everywhere. It went to the Wanhe City Lord’s taxes, the price of rice at the Southern Gate, a noble lady’s jade combs and a famous jeweller’s silver pins. Nobody on the barge mentioned a hairpin with three crescents on it.

He didn’t ask about it. Once in the dark, he reached into his left sleeve from habit and found only the chalk and folded sketch. Ning Zhe still had the pin. Shi Feng withdrew his hand before the merchant could notice.

On the tenth morning, at the start of summer, the barge came out of the mist.

A hundred channels opened around them, crowded with grain and salt barges, pleasure boats and white-sailed Pavilion ships. Fishing skiffs darted through the gaps. Shi Feng listened to the noise and watched the traffic, amazed at how much moved through a single river city.

Then the mist thinned, and Wanhe rose out of it.

Its walls were grey stone, so long that both ends were lost in the haze. Tower after tower stood behind them, roofs on roofs, all the way up a hill to a palace whose gold tiles caught the first sun. Above the water gate hung a row of red lanterns, each one as tall as a man.

Hearing about it was nothing like seeing it, Shi Feng thought. Great Liang’s capital would fit inside one corner of this.

“One,” Ji Yuanhe said, looking up at the lanterns. “Two. Three. Four…”

He counted all the way along the gate. There were eighty-one.

Shi Feng took out the bounty sketch, turned it over, and wrote on the back with his chalk stub.

Arrived. Rent first.

Shi Feng looked at his note with satisfaction. He needed a room before anything else: somewhere Ji Yuanhe could rest and he could begin earning without the whole city watching.

“Wanhe!” Mou Dagui bellowed from the tiller. “Water gate! Everybody off, and have your papers ready! The toll here bites!”

The barge bumped against the stone quay. A line of passengers was already forming at a toll booth under the lanterns, where a clerk in a blue official’s cap sat behind a table with a ledger and a cup of tea.

When Shi Feng’s turn came, he set down his travel slip with both hands. It had come out of the ring with his receipts: a square of yellow paper with Artificer Hall’s stamp in one corner and the Great Liang royal seal in the other.

The clerk picked it up, read it, turned it over, and read it again.

Then he put down his tea and laughed so hard that the whole queue turned round to look.