Chapter 63 — The Old Master Who Chose the Wrong Body

CHAPTER 63

The Old Master Who Chose the Wrong Body

The ring had resisted Shi Feng's careful probe again. He had waited until Ling Qingzhu slept before taking it into the kitchen, well away from her bed. Xu Changhe's medicine cost notes lay beside the lamp; the elder's warning about finished pill markups had set him examining the sealed spatial ring he carried out of Chiyun Ruins.

A cold thread moved across his fingers. Shi Feng put the black metal down.

The laugh came from above the ring.

Shi Feng’s knife was already in his hand. He rose without scraping his chair and put the table between himself and the cold gathering over the black metal. The ring’s storage was still closed. Nothing opened under his qi. Whatever lived inside chose its own way out, through a hairline crack in the outer seal.

A thread of shadow climbed up from the crack and thickened into an old man’s face.

“At last,” Mo Tianheng said.

His features were almost transparent, but his eyes weren’t. They moved over Shi Feng’s shoulders, chest and throat with the hungry interest of a butcher inspecting a pig.

Shi Feng moved the knife point toward the ring. “Name,” Shi Feng said calmly.

“Brat! This master is Mo Tianheng of Sky Pavilion!” Mo Tianheng boomed. “Kneel. Meeting this master is the greatest luck of your pitiful life.”

“Then stay on your side of the table,” Shi Feng said.

“Hahaha, a brat with spine,” Mo Tianheng said, licking his thin lips. “Good. This master has waited a very long time for someone like you!”

Shi Feng’s scalp prickled. He thought: he doesn’t want to talk. He wants to move in.

Mo Tianheng laughed again, and pressure followed the sound, cold and enormous. The lamp flame bent flat. Shi Feng’s heart pounded. This was no Foundation Establishment cultivator.

“A knife against this master’s spirit?” Mo Tianheng sneered. “Ridiculous. When this master stood at Profound Heaven, your ancestors were begging for pills!”

Shi Feng’s expression stayed calm. He didn’t know what Profound Heaven was, but he understood the pressure well enough. He thought: this old thing is a ghost that has waited a very long time for a body, and I’m the body.

He stabbed at the ring.

The shadow slid through the blade as if through smoke and entered his forehead. Cold flooded his skull. His hand missed the table edge, and his knee struck the floor hard enough to crack the paving tile.

“Stop struggling, brat!” Mo Tianheng’s voice roared inside his head. “Empty your mind and hand this master your body.”

“Get out,” Shi Feng gritted out, spitting blood from a bitten tongue.

He didn’t dare shout for help. Ling Qingzhu was asleep across the courtyard, and her sword couldn’t cut a spirit.

He couldn’t fight this enemy. There was no throat to seize, no arm to break, no weapon to snap. All his strength, which could crush men a full realm above him, found nothing to grip. Shi Feng felt real fear for the first time in months, and he despised it.

Mo Tianheng pushed deeper. Pictures tumbled through Shi Feng’s sight: a furnace larger than a house, a white flame held still between two fingers, a robe stitched with the Sky Pavilion emblem, rows of herbs with names he didn’t know. Then a greedy examination swept through his meridians.

“What a body,” Mo Tianheng whispered. “After all these years... what a body.”

Shi Feng’s fingers found the table, and the wood cracked under them. The spirit passed through one meridian, then another, and its delight grew sharper as the network went on past every number it expected.

“Three hundred and sixty,” Mo Tianheng said, and his voice shook. “That’s the limit of heaven and earth. How can it be?”

The first Epoch Meridian answered his probing. Then the second. Then the third, the fourth and the last.

“Five?” Mo Tianheng cried. “Impossible! Even in my age, no one reached this. Three hundred and sixty-five. This is the body of the age.”

The old man’s face froze in shock for an instant. Greed swallowed it.

“Mine!” Mo Tianheng roared. “This body is mine.”

The spirit gave up its careful pressure and hurled itself at the living centre of Shi Feng’s being. Shi Feng thought: I didn’t survive eighteen months as a cripple and fight my way out of Heilu Marsh only to become a coat for some dead stranger.

“Never,” Shi Feng said through his teeth.

Beneath his breastbone, the ancient hunger opened.

Mo Tianheng stopped moving.

“What’s this?” Mo Tianheng stammered. His voice dropped from triumph to terror. “This hunger... All-Devouring... Impossible.”

The cold recoiled, and then it began to slide downward. It wasn’t heading for the ring or any road of escape. Something inside the body he came to steal was pulling him in.

“No!” Mo Tianheng screamed. “Let go of me!”

The scream carried no air, but Shi Feng felt it tear through the invading will. The old spirit lashed out and scattered the pictures in his sight. The great furnace split. The white flame turned into a thousand pale threads, and the old man’s will tried to hide inside the knowledge it carried.

The hunger found it anyway.

“Wait! Wait!” Mo Tianheng begged. “Little friend! Young master... This master... no, this old man can teach you! Spare me, and I’ll make you the greatest alchemist in the kingdom!”

Shi Feng braced himself against the table. His expression was grim, and his arms were trembling.

“Terms,” Shi Feng said, hoarse. “You teach. You take no body. No bow. I leave when I say.”

“Terms!” Mo Tianheng’s voice cracked between outrage and hope. “A kingdom offered, and the brat bargains like a fishwife! No bow, then, a nod, a shallow nod. No body, a finger, one finger to hold the brush, and the ring, when you go, the ring stays, you’ll sign for the ring, you’ll—”

The hunger took him in the middle of the clause. What was left of the cold shrank to a single narrow point, and then the point broke.

“You should have asked before you came in,” Shi Feng said, hoarse but flat.

Shi Feng lay on the floor and breathed through his teeth. His knife rested beside the cracked tile. The black ring sat on the table exactly where he left it.

No face rose from it. No old master remained to bargain for better terms.

It was over. A body thief had waited who knew how many years, and the body he chose had eaten him.

Then the gift arrived.

Names settled onto the strange herbs in his memory. Scents joined their properties. He knew why the white flame had narrowed at that moment, why one extraction needed stillness and another a sudden surge.

It was more than recipes. A pair of hands that weren’t his own did these things ten thousand times. He remembered their judgement and their corrections, and the exact resistance of a mixture just before it changed.

Mo Tianheng was a formidable man, Shi Feng thought. And he chose to be a body thief.

Both facts could sit in one mind. The Sky Pavilion emblem in those memories didn’t make every Sky Pavilion merchant a villain. This crime belonged to the man who committed it.

Shi Feng slowly stood up.

He checked his cultivation first. It didn’t leap to Profound Heaven. The golden traces in his bones were still unfinished, and his qi was still the qi of Bone Refinement, however remarkable the body that carried it.

He looked at the little clay furnace by the wall, and he knew its limits at once. He also saw the errors in his wound wash, including one small loss of useful substance that Xu Changhe’s notes never mentioned.

“So that’s how it is,” Shi Feng murmured.

He remembered techniques his body couldn’t possibly perform. He lifted a hand and traced one simple control movement. His fingers followed the shape. His qi didn’t follow the remembered response.

He lowered the hand and sighed. The knowledge and the experience survived the spirit’s death. The master’s realm and the master’s body didn’t become his.

He opened the kitchen door and looked across the courtyard. The window of the main room stayed dark. Ling Qingzhu hadn’t woken once. Beyond the wall the night watch struck its wooden clapper.

Shi Feng picked up the knife, checked the sealed ring and righted the chair. He was shaken, but he was also whole.

A lifetime of alchemy stood before him.

Now he only needed to find out what his own hands could do with it.