Chapter 624 — Ticket Sixty-One

CHAPTER 624

Ticket Sixty-One

The young man at the door had a plain sword at his hip and a small black bell on his belt. The dust of a long road was on his boots.

“You fold your fire to the left,” Ao Tong said. “The barges talk about it all the way up the river.”

“Brother Ao!” Shi Feng said, delighted. “You came a long way for noodles.”

“I’m escorting an elder of the Valley south,” Ao Tong said. “She’s ill. Come to the inn and look at her.”

Shi Feng leaned on the counter and smiled the smile Lin Langtian used on rich men.

“Senior Brother Lin’s Lesson thirty-one,” Shi Feng said. “Agree on the house-call fee before you go. Mine is two thousand stones, Brother Ao.”

Ao Tong looked at him for a long moment.

“She won’t pay to be visited,” Ao Tong said.

“Then she can visit me,” Shi Feng said. “The queue is free.”

Ao Tong turned and left without another word. Tao Xiaoyu, who had been listening behind the herb shelves, poked her head out.

“Master, you just chased off a Thunder Abyss disciple over shoe money,” Tao Xiaoyu said.

“I didn't chase him,” Shi Feng replied. “I offered a house call for two thousand. If they don't want to pay it, they can queue here like everyone else.”

At dawn the next day, a woman in a grey robe with a violet collar took ticket sixty-one from Tao Xiaoyu’s hand and joined the end of the queue.

She was tall and straight-backed, with white streaks at her temples and a face that had clearly forgotten how to smile. She didn’t speak to anyone. Ao Tong kept one pace behind her without speaking.

The queue noticed at once.

“That’s a Thunder Abyss robe! Look at the collar!”

“To think that a Valley elder would stand in a noodle lane!”

“Don’t stare, you fool. Lightning doesn’t need a reason.”

“…”

Shi Feng worked through sixty tickets with great cheer and kept glancing at her.

She’d rather stand two hours in the sun than pay two thousand for my shoes, he thought. Proud. Very proud. I like her already.

“Sixty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said from the back furnace, at exactly the right moment.

Shi Feng led the woman into the back room and drew the screen. Ao Tong stood at its edge.

“Elder Kou Yueqin,” Ao Tong said quietly, by way of introduction.

Kou Yueqin sat and laid a book on the table. It was an old copy of a cultivation manual, the binding soft with use. One verse on an open page had been struck through in red ink, then corrected in the margin, then struck through again. There were at least twenty corrections, in the same strict hand.

She looked at him and said nothing at all.

“May I, Elder?” Shi Feng asked.

She gave one small nod. He let his Spirit Sense touch her lightly.

Her lightning qi was clean and fierce. It ran down from her crown in a bright stream, through the Heart Gate, and stopped dead one meridian lower. There it hit a black knot, and the knot was crusted over in layers, one on top of another.

He counted them. Eleven.

“Eleven winters,” Shi Feng said. “And the first crust is the thinnest, so it formed when your qi was strongest. For a lightning cultivator, that’s the last thunder of the year. The ninth month, eleven years ago.”

Kou Yueqin’s fingers tightened on the edge of the manual. Ao Tong’s face changed.

“And you’ve been blaming verse seven ever since,” Shi Feng went on, tapping the red ink. “It isn’t wrong. First, verse seven moves lightning through the Heart Gate, and your knot sits one meridian lower. Second, the whole Valley trains this manual. If verse seven were wrong, the Valley would be full of coughing elders. Third, the knot has a seam.” He sat back. “Manuals don’t leave seams, Elder. Pills do. You took something that autumn, and it’s been eating you ever since.”

The room was silent.

Kou Yueqin looked at him with real attention for the first time. He'd named the date of her illness without hearing her history. She didn’t speak, but she closed the manual over the red ink.

“The cure is a Soul Formation-grade counter-pill,” Shi Feng said. “It has to be Major Success. Seven clouds. Anything less won’t cut the knot, it’ll only make it angry.” He stood and rolled up his sleeves. “I have the right herbs in my surplus. I can refine it here.”

He lit the main furnace there and then. Ao Tong watched every movement of his left hand.

The clouds rose one after another over the lid. Five. Six. Seven. He held it there, and the pill came out a deep, clear blue.

Kou Yueqin swallowed it without hesitating. For ten breaths, nothing happened.

Then she bent over the basin and coughed up a mouthful of black blood.

“Rinse your mouth, Elder,” Shi Feng said, handing her a clean cloth.

She wiped her lips and sat straight again at once, determined not to discuss coughing blood in front of the juniors.

Shi Feng looked down into the basin. He meant only to check the knot’s broken edge with his Spirit Sense. Then he saw the seam clearly, and his hands went cold.

It was a fold. A neat triple fold at the pill’s core, closed one beat early on the last turn. He had seen that fold on the trays in Hall Two every day for three months. It was the Pit’s way of making a pill hide what it carried.

Someone in the Pill Pit had made this pill eleven years ago.

“Is it gone?” Ao Tong asked.

Shi Feng put his hands behind his back and kept his voice light.

“No, Brother Ao,” Shi Feng said. “That was only the top of it.”