Chapter 635 — The Furnace Lid

CHAPTER 635

The Furnace Lid

Shi Feng didn’t look up. He put his bloody hand flat on the main furnace and opened its vents.

The Thousand Forge Flame Art answered at once. At Perfection, it didn’t roar or spit. The fire woke white-gold and steady, exactly as high as he wanted. Light filled the shop, and the heat rose straight into the rafters.

The killer’s concealment hid his qi. It didn’t hide a man from an oven.

The old beams began to tick and groan in the heat, and the one carrying a man’s weight groaned loudest.

A drop of sweat fell from the dark and hissed on the furnace lid.

“Nine,” Ji Yuanhe said from under the stand.

A thin whistle filled the shop, and nine silver lines shot down from the third beam, fine as hair. They sliced through the hanging herb bundles and a jar of ember root.

Shi Feng stepped up into the air.

Cloud Ladder Step put one rung of qi under each foot, and he climbed the rising heat. The grey Sword came out of his ring already moving. Iron River Sword Art, at Perfection, didn’t chop. It flowed. One unbroken stroke ran across the threads, and the heavy blade broke all nine.

He landed on the second beam, a hand wide and black with soot. The killer stood on the third, two paces away, a lean grey-faced man with a short knife in each hand.

For three breaths neither man moved.

Then the killer came across the gap.

Both knives worked at once, inside the Sword’s reach. Shi Feng gave ground along the beam. One knife scored his ribs. The other skated off the Sword’s flat with a shriek. His left arm was slowing, and the killer pressed on that side.

“Eleven men,” the killer said, almost gently.

“Then you know how this goes,” Shi Feng replied, and stepped off the beam.

He dropped onto a lower rung of qi and cut upward, at the wood under the man. The Iron River stroke went through the old third beam in one clean line.

Crack!

The beam folded, and the killer fell with it.

He twisted in the air and kicked off the falling timber toward the smoke vent. Shi Feng pushed his right palm at the furnace.

A column of Thousand Forge fire shot straight up through the vent, white-gold and as thick as a man. The killer pulled back so hard he dropped to the floor between the furnaces.

“Twelve,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Thirteen.”

The killer ran for the shutters.

Outside, Lamp-Oil Lane was already awake. Nobody slept through fire coming out of a roof.

The patrol sergeant whose captain Feng Shi had cured was first to the shop, a bowl of noodles still in his hand. Tao Erniang came behind him in her nightrobe, holding a ladle like a sabre, and half the lane behind her.

The shutters burst outward. A man in black came through them head first, and a cold aura rolled over the whole lane.

“That’s Soul Formation!” the sergeant shouted. “Mid Soul Formation! Everyone get back!”

Nobody had time to. A hand shot out of the broken shutters behind the man, closed on his ankle and pulled.

He went back inside the way he had come out.

The killer rolled and came up on one knee, a knife still in his left hand. He gathered everything he had into his right palm until the air around it darkened.

“No one who has taken the Sinking Well Palm has ever stood up ag—”

The palm struck Shi Feng in the chest.

Shi Feng didn’t block it. He opened his chest to it. The palm’s qi poured in, and the All-Devouring Physique swallowed every bit of it.

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said politely. “Delicious.”

The man froze for half a breath. In a fight, half a breath was a very long time.

Shi Feng caught his left wrist, turned the knife back on him and dragged the edge along his forearm. Then he threw him. The killer slammed into the main furnace, and Shi Feng lifted the heavy iron lid in one hand and brought it down across his chest, pinning him to the cauldron’s rim.

Bang!

“Fourteen,” Ji Yuanhe said.

At the broken shutters, the lane stared in.

“He… he’s sitting on him?”

“That’s a Soul Formation killer! Master Feng’s an alchemist!”

“He must’ve put a pill in him first.”

“What pill? He used a lid!”

“…”

In the furnace light, the cut on the man’s arm was already turning purple.

“Now then,” Shi Feng said, sitting down on the lid. “First, the roof is a bad entrance. Tiles talk. Second, whoever hired you paid for a man who can’t count. Your feet were telling my friend every step before you took it. Third, he counted you in before you moved at all.” He touched his own bloody shoulder. “And you went after him. That’s why you’re under the lid.”

The man spat out his name, which was Zou Sha, and nothing else.

“Your knife was poisoned,” Shi Feng said. “I have a Common antidote on the shelf. It costs one name.”

Zou Sha looked at his arm. Professionals knew how to do sums.

“Hundred-Herb Hall,” Zou Sha said. “Master Ruo. Through a broker.”

Shi Feng fed him the antidote and swallowed one himself.

“Thieves! Murderers! Who’s been walking on my roof?” Tao Erniang shrieked through the shutters. “Those tiles cost money!”

“I’m billing him for them, Auntie,” Shi Feng called back.

By noon the next day, Hundred-Herb Hall had a bill for eleven roof tiles, one beam, one shutter, one lamp cord and one ruined night’s work. The Sky Pavilion did the rest. Its licence was revoked, its doors were sealed with Pavilion paper, and Zou Sha went to the City Lord’s court.

By dusk the lane had a new name for the main furnace: the Killer’s Lid. Feng Shi’s waiting list grew by forty names.

Steward Tan Shou came in person. Ever since the twelve thousand stones, he’d been very polite.

“No pill house in Wanhe will try this again soon,” Tan Shou said, bowing.

“Good,” Shi Feng said. “The roof can’t take another.”

Tan Shou smiled thinly and lowered his voice.

“Zou Sha didn’t know the hall, Master Feng Shi. He knew the broker,” Tan Shou said. “The broker left by the north road three days ago, and he kept his books in his head.” He paused. “Hundred-Herb Hall was one buyer. We don’t know who the others were.”