Chapter 654 — Three Coppers

CHAPTER 654

Three Coppers

“Brother Feng! You have to try this!” Hong Ba shouted.

He burst into the shop an hour late and loud, as usual. He was a broad-shouldered dock porter, and he’d carried Shi Feng’s herb crates since the summer. He slapped a small brown pill on the counter.

“Steady Heart!” Hong Ba announced. “Three coppers in the East Market! I’ve been eating one a day for a month. Three shifts, and I’m not tired! And when the foreman says carry, my legs carry before I even think about it!”

Shi Feng picked it up. It smelled faintly bitter-sweet.

He had smelled that before, in a teacup Chu Ze had brought, and before that, much further away, under a mountain.

He put the pill in his mouth.

The Physique refused it flatly. It didn’t digest it or weigh it or take its worth. It simply pushed it back up, the way it had once refused the Pill Pit’s obedience structure. Shi Feng spat it into his palm, grey and wet.

“Brother Feng?” Hong Ba asked, confused. “Is it that bad?”

“It’s very cheap,” Shi Feng said. “That’s what’s bad about it. Hong Ba, where’s this stall?”

Shi Feng hurried after Hong Ba. Three coppers put this within every porter’s reach. Whoever sold it wanted obedient workers, not a profit on pills.

The stall stood at the corner of the East Market’s fish row, under a faded awning. A tally board hung behind it, covered in names. Three men in brown sat on crates in front, and every one of them was early Soul Formation. A copper stall didn’t need guards like that.

“Steady Heart, three coppers,” the biggest one said, without getting up. “Buy or walk.”

“Neither. I’m closing the stall,” Shi Feng said. “There’s no Pavilion paper here. You’ve been selling these without permission, and I’m taking the board. Move aside if you want to keep your hands.”

The three men looked at each other and laughed.

“Courting death!” the big one roared, and all three came off the crates.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword.

The first man came in high with a chain. Shi Feng cut the chain. The second came low with a short blade, and Shi Feng stepped past him and cut the blade. The third leapt over the stall with both palms blazing, and Shi Feng let the Thousand Forge fire run down into the Sword.

The Sunset-Splitting Sword had always been a stroke. This time it was a sunset. The light spread wide and soft and red across the whole fish row, and inside it the edge was so thin he could hardly feel it. It cut the third man’s palms open, cut the awning post, and stopped a hair from the tally board.

Major Success.

All three were on the ground. Nobody in the fish row moved.

“Did he just…”

“Three Soul Formation! In three moves!”

“He’s the noodle-lane alchemist, isn’t he? The one who made it thunder!”

“…”

Shi Feng took down the tally board. The names on it weren’t buyers. They were stalls, forty of them, each with a stall number and a weekly count.

Forty, Shi Feng thought. So this isn’t a stall. It’s a market.

Branch Master Cen Rong read the board in her office without sitting down. Clerk Rao stood at her shoulder with a brush.

“One rat dropping spoils the whole pot of porridge,” Cen Rong said coldly.

She set the board down.

“You want a warrant,” Cen Rong said.

“A one-day purge warrant for the East Market,” Shi Feng said. “And a fee. Somebody has to taste forty stalls of poison, and I’m the only mouth in Wanhe that spits it back out. Call it a nose fee.”

“A nose fee,” Cen Rong said.

“It’s a very good nose, Branch Master,” Shi Feng said modestly.

Cen Rong looked at him for a while. Then she nodded once at Clerk Rao.

“Write it,” Cen Rong said. “One day. Pavilion guards to follow him. The nose fee to be set when the work is done.”

“At once, Branch Master,” Clerk Rao said politely, and her brush was already moving.

He walked the East Market all afternoon with a lacquer tray and four Pavilion guards. At every stall on the board he took one pill from every jar, put it in his mouth, and either swallowed it or spat it onto the tray.

“This is a terrible job,” Shi Feng complained loudly at the twelfth stall, spitting. “Do you know what I usually eat? Perfect pills. Tao Erniang’s noodles. Now look at me, tasting copper poison in a fish market. I want the nose fee doubled.”

The guard captain wrote down Master Feng’s demand with great care. The Pavilion had authorised the work; he wasn’t going to argue about the fee.

By late afternoon the tray held thirty-one grey lumps. The Physique had refused every one.

The guards took statements as they went. The buyers weren’t cultivators. They were porters, washerwomen, carters and dock boys. Over two hundred of them had been eating Steady Heart for weeks, and every one of them said the same thing: they weren’t tired, they did what they were told, and they couldn’t remember the last time they’d argued with anybody.

Shi Feng didn’t complain any more after that.

At the last stall, the guards found a ledger under a loose board. It listed deliveries, coppers and a single address at the bottom, written in a cramped clerk’s hand.

A warehouse on the river, by the old salt quay.

At dusk Shi Feng went to look at it from across the water. It was a long, quiet building with its shutters closed. Around the handle of its door, someone had tied a band of grey cloth.