Chapter 677 — The Order of the Herbs

CHAPTER 677

The Order of the Herbs

At midnight, the black line opened.

It didn’t tear. It swung open, white and silent, and cold light spilled across four thousand upturned faces.

“Roped parties, by rope-count!” Surveyor Ju Dewei called from the white posts. “Cangming Sword Palace, twenty-two! Azure Sun, nineteen! Thunder Abyss, eighteen!”

The sects went first, as everyone knew they would. Then the freelancers.

“Pan Hongzhu, fifteen!” Ju Dewei called, checking the next rope against his scroll.

“That’s us!” Pan Hongzhu roared, and dragged the whole rope forward.

Old Zuo checked the knot at his own waist one last time and grinned at Shi Feng.

“Heaven has unforeseen winds and clouds, Ah Fu,” Old Zuo said. “Keep your feet down.”

They stepped through the door.

The first fold turned the world inside out.

The sky went under Shi Feng’s boots. The ground hung over his head. His stomach tried to climb out through his ears. Behind him, a hunter from another company doubled over and vomited, and the vomit went sideways.

Then the storm came. It was a spatial storm, a wind of folded space with no sound at all.

“My boot!” Pan Hongzhu bellowed. “It took my boot!”

His left boot flew off into the white and simply wasn’t there anymore.

Up ahead, the Cangming line jerked. One disciple at the end lifted off his feet. His seniors grabbed for the rope, but the rope wasn’t tied tight enough, and the fold took him away in one breath.

He didn’t come back. Nobody went after him.

Shi Feng kept walking with the porter’s shuffle, bent forward under his pack. It was Drifting Ash Step, slowed down to the pace of a tired man. Every time the fold lifted the line, the others floated up a little. His feet stayed on the ground.

The nine floors inside him were heavy. He had laid them himself after his tribulation, and a fold couldn’t lift anything set that deep. Nobody on the rope noticed. They just thought the porter was slow.

A loose end of rope drifted past them out of the white.

Old Zuo caught it. It was grey-green ring-grass, his own family’s braid, from another company’s line. The end had been cut clean, one knot short.

Old Zuo looked at it for a long time. Then he wrapped it around his fist and walked on. For once, he didn’t say anything at all.

The fold spat them out on a terrace of soft black earth.

The Hollow Orchard of the Nine Autumns spread up the hillside in long steps, under a sky the colour of old jade. The first terrace held nine beds, and in the nine beds grew forty herbs. Shi Feng’s nose told him every one was Shattering Void-grade.

Between the beds stood the Pruners.

They were wooden puppets as tall as two men, with shears instead of hands. They didn’t move, and their heads were bowed.

A company from the west ridge reached the beds first. Their leader went straight for the ripest root in the third bed, a fat red thing as big as a child’s arm, and pulled it.

Snip.

A Pruner moved faster than anyone could see. The leader stood holding the root, and then he wasn’t holding anything, because his hand was on the ground.

He screamed. The company screamed with him.

“The shears! Did you see the shears?”

“His hand! Get his hand!”

“Nobody touch the beds! Nobody!”

“…”

Ten breaths later, a second party tried a different bed and the ripest leaf in it. The Pruner took that hand too.

Both parties had taken the ripest herb first, Shi Feng thought. Before risking a hand, he needed to see whether that choice was the mistake.

He looked at the beds again, properly this time.

Each bed had a bud, a leaf and a root, in the same spacing as the three stages of a furnace. He recognised the order from recipes he’d refined: bud first, then leaf, then root. The bud opened the furnace, the leaf carried the fire and the root held the pill. Put the root in first, and the pill burst.

The Orchard was a recipe. Whoever had planted it wanted the herbs taken in the order a pill would take them.

Shi Feng turned and tugged Old Zuo’s sleeve. His face was perfectly straight.

“Uncle Zuo,” Shi Feng whispered. “My granny always said bud before leaf, leaf before root, or the garden bites. It’s just a porter’s superstition.”

Shi Feng kept his amusement hidden. If Old Zuo passed it on as a harmless superstition, nobody would ask how a porter had read the beds.

Old Zuo looked at him. Then he looked at the Pruners. Then he leaned over to Pan Hongzhu and repeated it as a joke.

“Bud, leaf, root!” Pan Hongzhu snorted. “A granny’s rule, in the Orchard of the Nine Autumns!” He looked at the man on the ground with no hand. He stopped laughing. “Better to believe it than not. Bud first. Go slow.”

His best fighter reached into the first bed and picked the bud. The Pruner didn’t move. He picked the leaf. The Pruner didn’t move. He picked the root.

The Pruner stayed asleep.

Pan’s company stared at each other. Then they went from bed to bed in order, bud, leaf, root, and the Pruners didn’t stir once.

“Ha!” Pan Hongzhu shouted, slapping Old Zuo’s back. “Zuo, your porter’s granny is a genius!”

“She was a very wise woman,” Shi Feng said humbly, and loaded the herbs into his pack.

Across the terrace, other companies had started watching them. They were copying the order, slowly, without asking.

Old Zuo tilted his head toward a rock at the terrace’s edge.

A woman in a grey-green veil sat there with a small book on her knee. She hadn’t picked a single herb.

“That’s Madam Miao Ruoshui,” Old Zuo muttered. “She sells what she sees.”

Madam Miao Ruoshui looked at the porter in the straw hat. Then she looked at the rope-seller beside him.

She dipped her brush and wrote something down.