Chapter 599 — Stranger’s Tax

CHAPTER 599

Stranger’s Tax

“Great Liang!” the toll clerk wheezed, wiping his eyes. “Sergeant, come and look. A royal seal from a kingdom nobody’s heard of!”

The gate sergeant strolled over and flicked the travel slip with his thumb.

“Frontier papers, a frontier face, and a lame old man,” the gate sergeant said. “Stranger’s tax is forty stones. The lame one’s forty too.”

“He walks slower than I do, Sergeant,” Shi Feng said politely. “Shouldn’t he cost less?”

“He takes up the same space on my bridge,” the gate sergeant said. “Forty.”

Wanhe’s water gate rose out of the river like a grey cliff, with barges queued six deep beneath it. Porters ran up the wet steps with sacks on their heads. Over the arch hung a red board as tall as a house: THE SOUTHERN GATE.

[Core of soul: mid Nascent Soul, holding | Cash: 900]

Ji Yuanhe stood at Shi Feng’s shoulder and stared at the paving.

“Thirty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Thirty-two.”

“What’s he counting?” the gate sergeant demanded.

“Your stones, Sergeant,” Shi Feng said. “He likes things that stay where they’re put.”

The guards behind the sergeant laughed. The sergeant didn’t. He just held out his palm.

Eighty stones fed a frontier family of four for a month. Shi Feng counted them from the violet pouch and bowed as though grateful.

Remember the price, Shi Feng thought. Arguing now would keep him at the gate.

He filed the sergeant’s square face away beside the number eighty. Senior Brother would have written it on the back of a receipt.

“One more thing, frontier boy,” the gate sergeant said, waving them through. “I saw that herb case on your belt. In Wanhe, nobody sells a pill without Sky Pavilion paper. No paper, and the City Lord’s patrol breaks your furnace. Then your fingers.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Shi Feng said warmly. “That warning’s worth at least eighty stones.”

The gate sergeant opened his mouth, couldn’t decide whether he’d been insulted, and shut it again.

Inside the gate, the prices hit like a slap. A bowl of plain noodles cost two stones. A bed above the fish market cost thirty a night.

“Everything’s ten times what I know,” Shi Feng told Ji Yuanhe, delighted. “Isn’t it wonderful? Ten times the prices means ten times the fees.”

“Forty-five,” Ji Yuanhe said to a gutter stone.

I’m a stranger here, Shi Feng thought. He had little money, no selling paper and Ji Yuanhe to care for. Finding out the local rules came before showing anyone what he could do.

So paper came first.

The Wanhe branch rose nine storeys above the river, its eaves hung with bronze bells. Inside, twenty well-dressed alchemists waited along a red rope. Shi Feng joined them in his torn robe, river mud still marking the hem.

Heads turned. Noses wrinkled.

When his turn came, the clerk behind the counter rose and bowed. She was a neat woman in her thirties with a jade brush tucked behind one ear.

“Welcome, honoured guest,” Clerk Rao Yingchun said. “How may the Wanhe branch serve you?”

That was the Sky Pavilion. A beggar walked in, and they still called him an honoured guest.

“I hold a 3 Mark from a frontier regional tower,” Shi Feng said. “My token was lost on the road. I’d like the register confirmed so I can sell pills.”

“Of course,” Clerk Rao Yingchun said, without a flicker. “The branch will send for the provincial copy of the register. It takes one stick of incense. Please have some tea while you wait.”

Tea came on a lacquer tray.

A bell rang at the back of the hall. A covered tray travelled the red rope on a porter’s hands, and the cloth lifted a finger’s width at each cluster of bidders: one pill, dark and faceted, 4 Mark, the seal on its base shown and covered again. Bids went up on tablets, without a word. Clerk Rao Yingchun entered each figure in her ledger at the counter and did not leave her place.

Behind him, a man in silver-embroidered silk laughed loudly enough for the whole hall.

“A regional tower!” the silk-robed alchemist said. “Out there they give a Mark to anyone who can boil soup without burning it. A regional Mark is a clerical curiosity.”

“A man depends on his clothes, a horse on its saddle,” the alchemist beside him added, looking at Shi Feng’s hem.

Shi Feng ignored the pair and drank his tea. The clerk had treated him properly; he’d wait for the register.

“Seventy,” Ji Yuanhe told the floor tiles.

The incense burned down. A runner brought a slip of yellow paper sealed in red wax, and Clerk Rao Yingchun opened it at the counter with both hands.

“Provincial copy, frontier regional tower,” Clerk Rao Yingchun read. “3 Mark. Highest count at the sitting, four clouds. Age at registration, twenty-one. Name…”

She paused and looked up.

“Honoured guest, there is a typo,” Clerk Rao Yingchun said apologetically. “The characters of your name were written in reverse. Feng Shi. If you give me your true name, the branch will file a correction. It takes three months.”

“The tower can’t even spell its own geniuses!” the silk-robed alchemist snorted.

Shi Feng took the yellow slip and read it. Feng Shi. Two characters, swapped by a tired clerk on a cold frontier night.

Somewhere to the south and west, a man with a folding chair was looking for Alchemist Shi.

Shi Feng smiled. It was simply too good.

“Leave it,” Shi Feng said, handing the slip back. “I’m fond of it. It sounds like a man nobody can find.”

Clerk Rao Yingchun bowed. “As the honoured guest wishes. On this branch’s books, you are Alchemist Feng Shi.”

Feng Shi could sell pills here while Ning Zhe searched for Alchemist Shi. Correcting the mistake would only hand his real name to anyone asking after him.

“Feng Shi?” the silk-robed alchemist said loudly. “Never heard of him.”

“Nobody has,” Shi Feng agreed happily.

Clerk Rao Yingchun wrote the alias on a fresh folder, then set her brush down and looked at him, still polite, but a little sorry.

“Alchemist Feng,” Clerk Rao Yingchun said. “Before I stamp your selling licence, there’s one rule about frontier Marks that the honoured guest should hear.”