Chapter 662 — The Fire-and-Ice Ring

CHAPTER 662

The Fire-and-Ice Ring

“Hanyan Basin,” Liu Su said the next morning, and laid a strip of red paper on the table. “A dead lake with a ring around it, half fire and half ice. In the middle, where the two halves meet, grows a Frost-Flame Root.”

“Grade?” Shi Feng asked.

“Shattering Void,” Liu Su said. Tap. “Eleven parties went in this spring.” Tap. “Three came out.”

“And the other eight?” Shi Feng asked.

“The other eight are part of the ring now, young master,” Liu Su said.

Ji Yuanhe stopped counting her taps and looked at Shi Feng.

Shi Feng was already smiling. A Shattering Void-grade herb that no auction could sell, because nobody could fetch it. He needed the root and couldn’t buy it. He’d have to inspect the basin himself before deciding how to cross it.

He bought her burn salve, frost salve and two sacks of grey-market supplement herbs with no Pavilion seal on them, plus a gourd, a rope and a good pair of boots. Liu Su added it up with eleven taps of her fan.

[Money: 10.8M → 9.8M]

He left Ji Yuanhe at Willow Ford with Liu Su’s maid and chestnuts to count. Lesson thirty-seven, Shi Feng thought: inspect what frightened everyone else before deciding for yourself. Senior Brother would approve.

The rim camp at Hanyan was two hundred tents on a ridge of black rock. Below it, the basin steamed on one side and glittered on the other. A line of blue banners marked the best ground.

Shi Feng set his noodle pot on three stones at the edge of the camp and lit a fire under it.

“A cook?” Huo Weiran asked, looking over from the Cangming party. A long sword hung at his hip, and his aura pressed down on the whole camp. Shattering Void. His juniors stood behind him in a row.

“An alchemist, Senior,” Shi Feng said politely. “3 Mark.”

Huo Weiran laughed out loud, calling his juniors closer so they could hear.

“A 3 Mark with a noodle pot!” Huo Weiran said. “Do you know where you are? The fire in there cooks Soul Formation cultivators like dumplings. The ice is worse. It goes into the marrow. I, Huo Weiran of the Cangming Sword Palace, am going in at noon, and even I’ve had my elders burn incense for me.”

“Thank you, Senior Huo,” Shi Feng said warmly. “That’s five sentences. At ten silver a sentence, you owe me fifty.”

“I owe you?” Huo Weiran demanded, staring at him.

“For my listening,” Shi Feng said. “Listening is a service. Six sentences now. I’ll round down to sixty.”

His juniors made choking noises.

“Trash,” Huo Weiran said coldly, and turned away.

“Seventy,” Shi Feng called after him, making the nearest juniors choke back their laughter.

At noon the Cangming party went down the slope. Two other sects went in after them. Shi Feng stirred his broth, ate a bowl, and watched.

The first party was carried out at dusk. Half the men were burnt red and blistered. The other half were blue-white and stiff, with frost in their eyebrows. The second party came out the same way.

Shi Feng frowned and looked closer. The burnt men were the ones whose qi shields were made for ice. The frozen men had raised shields against fire. The ring had turned every shield around and fed it to the opposite half.

So the ring eats qi, Shi Feng thought. Then it gets no qi from me.

Huo Weiran came out last, walking, but with both arms bandaged to the shoulder and one ear black with frost. He stopped beside the noodle pot.

“Go in, bumpkin,” Huo Weiran said through his teeth. “We’ll sell your boots.”

Shi Feng sealed his qi at the edge of the slope. He shut every meridian and let the soul sink down, until he was nothing but a man in a cheap coat with a gourd of Tao Erniang’s broth on his belt.

Then he walked in like a mortal.

The fire half hit him first. It wasn’t flame. It was heat with nothing in it but heat, and it peeled the skin off his cheeks and the backs of his hands in twenty steps. His body wanted to fight it with qi. He didn’t let it.

Instead, the Physique ate it.

The heat went into him, and what hurt him most was taken in first. The pain stayed. The damage didn’t get deeper. Shi Feng took a mouthful of broth.

At the divide, the ground was black glass on the left and white rime on the right. The ice half bit three fingers of his left hand black in the time it took to kneel. He let the Physique eat that too, and his teeth chattered.

Between the two halves grew the Frost-Flame Root. It was the size of a child’s arm, red on one side and blue on the other, with five fat buds along its back.

Under the root lay a stone.

It was grey, smooth and the size of a fist, and it was humming. Shi Feng knew that note. It was the sound a furnace made in the instant before a pill took shape, when fire and water were perfectly balanced. He had heard it ten thousand times and never once outside a furnace.

He lifted the root first and wrapped it in his coat. Then he picked up the stone.

It was warm and cold at once. A spirit material meant a week of stomach ache. Shi Feng hesitated.

I can endure the ache, Shi Feng thought. He swallowed it before he could waste more time weighing the discomfort.

The stone went down. The humming stopped.

All around the basin, the fire went out. The ice stopped glittering. In ten breaths the whole ring settled into one flat, dull temperature.

Shi Feng stood up slowly and wiped his mouth.

The cold had stopped. The heat had stopped. But the quiet that took their place was wrong.