Chapter 627 — The Situ Jade Slip

CHAPTER 627

The Situ Jade Slip

At noon Shi Feng set his own small furnace down in the Situ courtyard and asked for a stool.

“You’ll refine here?” Situ Hongzhang asked. “Not in your shop?”

“You want to watch,” Shi Feng replied. “I'll refine here so you can see what goes into your son's medicine.”

Situ Hongzhang looked at him for a moment and then sat down on the courtyard steps like a common man. Half the household crowded behind him. Steward Pu Gen stood stiffly at the side with a ledger, still a little red around the ears.

Shi Feng laid the sun-marrow root on the fire first and wrapped the cooler herbs round it one at a time. The root wanted to burn hot and fast. He let it, but only on the inside.

One cloud rose over the lid. Then two, three, four. A fifth came, then a sixth, thick and white, and it held.

“Six,” someone whispered behind the steward.

“Major Success,” Situ Hongzhang said quietly. A Situ knew the ladder. “Twelve healers, and none of them ever gave me a number.”

The pill came out the colour of a winter sunrise and warm to the touch. Shi Feng carried it inside himself, crushed it in warm water and fed it to the boy one spoonful at a time.

Then they waited.

For an hour, nothing happened. Pu Gen began to sweat. For the second hour, the boy’s breathing slowed, and the nursemaid began to cry quietly in the corner. Shi Feng sat on the floor beside the bed and ate a sesame cake from his sleeve, keeping his Spirit Sense on the boy while he waited.

Near dusk, the blue left the boy’s lips.

Then the colour came back into his cheeks, pink and ordinary. His small fingers twitched under the quilts. He opened his eyes, looked at the ceiling, then at the strange young man eating a sesame cake next to his bed.

“I’m hungry,” Situ Mian said.

The nursemaid wailed.

“He’s breathing! He’s breathing!” the nursemaid cried.

Situ Hongzhang didn’t make a sound. He walked across the room, knelt by the bed and put his big inky hand on his son’s head. He stayed like that for a long time.

Shi Feng gave the boy the rest of his sesame cake and went out to the courtyard so the father could have the room.

When Situ Hongzhang came out, his eyes were red with relief instead of exhaustion.

“Name it,” Situ Hongzhang said. “Stones, or a favour from this house. Plenty of men add flowers to brocade for the Situ family. You brought charcoal in the snow. The house won’t forget that.”

Shi Feng thought it through quickly.

Stones were easy. Every rich man in Wanhe had stones. But a favour from the Situ branch could help him in Tianjing, where he knew nobody. He didn't want to demand so much that Situ Hongzhang regretted the promise. A fair fee and a letter of introduction would be more useful than an extravagant claim.

“Twenty thousand, Lord Situ,” Shi Feng said. “That covers the root, the pill and the house call. I don’t charge more because the patient is a Situ. I charge what the pill is worth.”

Pu Gen’s brush stopped. He clearly couldn’t believe a man was turning down an open promise from a Situ.

“And the favour?” Situ Hongzhang asked.

“One day I may go to the capital,” Shi Feng said. “I’d like a letter to someone there who won’t throw me out. That’s all.”

Situ Hongzhang gave a short laugh, the first Shi Feng had heard from him.

“That’s all,” Situ Hongzhang repeated. “Pu Gen, bring the jade.”

The slip he wrote was plain green jade, sealed with the branch house’s crest. Situ Hongzhang read it aloud as he wrote, the way an official reads an order.

“To the steward of the Situ town house in Tianjing. The bearer, Alchemist Feng Shi of Wanhe, saved my son’s life. Receive him. And this branch owes the bearer one request, within my own authority, to be honoured on sight,” Situ Hongzhang read, and pressed the seal. “That’s the most this branch can promise, and it’s yours.”

Shi Feng accepted the slip with both hands and bowed properly.

[Stones: 250,000 → 330,000]

Pu Gen walked him to the gate. At the threshold, the steward stopped, took two hundred stones from his own sleeve and held them out with a deep bow.

“The time this steward spent arguing,” Pu Gen said stiffly. “It should come from this steward’s own purse, not the house’s. This steward was blind.”

“You keep it, Steward Pu,” Shi Feng said cheerfully. “It was the most fun I had all day, apart from the sesame cake. Consider it paid.”

Pu Gen bowed even lower, embarrassed and relieved that the alchemist hadn't held the argument against him.

Walking home along the east bank, Shi Feng turned the jade slip over in his fingers. Feng Shi, it said, in Situ Hongzhang’s clean hand. Even the five families were writing his alias down now.

That’s good, he thought. The more people write Feng Shi, the fewer ask about Shi Feng.

He reached Lamp-Oil Lane after dark and stopped.

The lane was full. There were lanterns from one end to the other, and men with herb crates on their shoulders, and barges knocking at the steps by the canal. Tao Xiaoyu ran up to him with the Commission Book clutched to her chest.

“Master! The autumn herb barges came in this afternoon!” Tao Xiaoyu said breathlessly. “I’ve stopped writing names at a hundred and forty!”