Chapter 61 — The Bones That Answered Gold

CHAPTER 61

The Bones That Answered Gold

Ling Qingzhu opened the gate before Shi Feng could lift the latch a second time. Her white veil was tied hastily, her hair pinned loosely, and flour marked one sleeve. She looked at his pack, his plain sword, and the dirt dried along the edges of his boots.

“Several days, you said. You lied. Or you can’t count,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“The passage was less convenient than the map,” Shi Feng said.

He stepped into the courtyard. The familiar pear tree threw its shadow across the water jar. After the dark, cramped ruin, even the crooked roof tiles looked almost fancy.

Ling Qingzhu didn’t move aside.

“So where’s the rest of your party?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“Some went home,” Shi Feng said. “Some decided to rob me.”

She studied his face. He spoke as bluntly as he did when he told a vegetable seller that the bottom of the basket held more mud than food.

“You just walked in. Like you’d fetched noodles,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Obviously,” Shi Feng said.

She should have found that irritating. Instead, the tension in her shoulders eased, and she was annoyed at herself for it.

Then she saw the blood in the fold of his cuff. He’d washed in a stream outside the capital, but the fold had escaped him.

“Is that blood? Is it yours?” Ling Qingzhu asked sharply.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

Her eyes stayed on the stain a moment longer. Then she turned toward the kitchen without another word.

“Aiya, young master, you’re back!” Granny Qin called over the lane wall, a sesame cake already in her hand. “Your wife stood at that gate three evenings in a row! Three! I told her the ruins eat people, and she said she was only checking the latch! Here, eat, you’re all skin and bones!”

“Granny Qin, stop making things up! I was checking the latch! It’s a bad latch!” Ling Qingzhu said from the kitchen door. Her ears went red.

“Oh, little wife, no need to be shy!” Granny Qin cackled, and pushed the cake over the wall.

Shi Feng said nothing. Only the corner of his mouth moved, and his expression stayed perfectly flat otherwise.

The meal was waiting: rice, vegetables, and a soup with the pieces cut in all different sizes. Shi Feng sat and ate. The rice was too soft. One piece of radish in the soup was bigger than the spoon, and he ate it without a word.

Ling Qingzhu watched his chopsticks.

“Why do you look like you’re facing an enemy?” Ling Qingzhu said. “It’s just food.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said.

“I followed the instructions. The rice refused,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Rice does that when the fire goes out,” Shi Feng said.

She glanced toward the stove. He followed her glance and saw three damp sticks beside it, scorched at one end and still unburned in the middle. Shi Feng lowered his bowl to hide his smile, but Ling Qingzhu saw it anyway, and her expression stiffened.

Only after Granny Qin disappeared behind her brazier did Ling Qingzhu close the gate and remove her veil. Shi Feng raised his head again.

“Did the soup suddenly improve?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“The view did,” Shi Feng replied.

She snatched the ladle. His next helping contained almost no meat.

“Stop smirking! Fine. Chickens get it.” Ling Qingzhu said.

“I plan to finish eating first,” Shi Feng said, and took a second helping.

Afterward he washed the bowls while she sat under the pear tree. Neither of them mentioned how often she’d looked toward the lane while he was away. Shi Feng didn’t turn her clumsy meal into an apology she’d never offered, he thought. It was enough that she made it.

The next morning, he carried Duan Kang’s flying blade into a weapon counter near the Sky Pavilion square.

“Unclaimed salvage,” Shi Feng said, and laid the wrapped blade on the counter without naming Chiyun Ruins. Surviving porters like Gu Tie had seen Duan Kang’s group enter that gorge, and there was no reason to leave a trail connecting the dead leader’s weapon to his own name.

The counter keeper tested the cold edge with a brass ring, saw the clean spirit-channel engraving, and paid four hundred and sixty spirit stones after a single counter-offer. Most of the money went straight to the medicines listed in his bone manual, along with two plain wooden practice blades from a side stall.

When he returned at dusk, Ling Qingzhu picked up one of the wooden blades under the pear tree, tested its balance with a surprisingly steady wrist, and traded three slow footwork turns with him before supper—the first of the short courtyard sword lessons that neither of them wrote into the contract.

That night, he waited until Ling Qingzhu’s breathing slowed behind the screen. Then he gathered the new medicines and the ruin packets and slipped into the kitchen. The pills smelled strong, and he didn’t want her waking to it. Some were badly rounded. One cracked while cooling. Their maker might have refused to put them on a respectable counter.

Shi Feng swallowed them without a second thought.

The medicine turned into strength inside him. There was no creeping resistance, no pile of impurities waiting to punish him later. The All-Devouring Physique didn’t care whether a pill had embarrassed its maker.

But cultivation still meant guiding the benefit where it belonged. He settled his breathing and followed the response of his skeleton.

The centipede’s vitality gave the final push, and the medicines sustained it. The stubborn places past three quarters of refinement no longer gave in just because he owned a magnificent meridian network. Each one had to be reached, fed, and brought into harmony with the strength around it.

Shi Feng didn’t complain about the work. I’ve decided to finish, he thought, and that’s the end of it.

Days passed between ordinary meals and secret night cycles. By day he bought rice, replaced lamp oil, and mended the pack strap Chiyun Ruins had nearly torn off. Ling Qingzhu found his new quietness less annoying than his old absences, though she scolded him when he forgot the porridge pot on the stove.

“It’s burnt again! That’s twice in seven days!” Ling Qingzhu said, holding it up. “Are you planning to eat charcoal?”

“I’m planning to buy a new pot,” Shi Feng said.

He bought it that afternoon instead of arguing that burnt porridge could still fill a stomach. Each night, once her breathing slowed, he slipped away to the kitchen, and the pale gaps in his skeleton narrowed.

A small bone beneath the heel answered. Then the thin places along the ribs. Then the final stubborn section near the base of the spine, which resisted three cycles in a row and wasn’t the least bit ashamed of it.

Shi Feng sent another current through it.

This time the response ran outward instead of dying at the edge. He sat up straight, and his heart pounded. All two hundred and six bones answered together, one perfect structure.

Ordinary Bone Refinement: complete!

For several breaths nothing else happened. He let the strength settle, following every connection. Many cultivators would have called this a huge waste of resources and gone straight after Foundation Establishment.

Then something deeper stirred.

A speck of gold appeared beneath the finished surface of a finger bone.

Shi Feng froze.

A second speck answered from a rib. A third glowed inside the spine. They didn’t spread like an injury, and they didn’t replace the sound refinement above them. They lay beneath it, opening a depth that stayed locked while the outer work was unfinished.

Ancestral Bones! Shi Feng thought, stunned. The name from the cultivation record came back with a clarity no description could give.

All his labor so far hadn’t finished the road. It had only uncovered the next section.

He followed one golden trace carefully. It accepted the strength, brightened a little, and demanded more. The demand was enormous compared with the visible change.

Shi Feng opened his eyes. Empty medicine packets lay beside his knee, and the sealed ring rested on the folded journal. Neither gave any answer to the cost of turning a whole skeleton gold.

Outside the kitchen, gray dawn light was creeping over the pear tree. A soft knock sounded on the kitchen door.

“Your bedding’s empty again. Do you ever sleep?” Ling Qingzhu said through the door. “Are you eating, or should I put the rice away?”

“In a moment,” Shi Feng said.

He wrapped the ring and rose, every movement steadier than before.

Heaven gave him an extraordinary body. Now it expected him to pay for every inch of it.