Chapter 686 — The Courtesy Test

CHAPTER 686

The Courtesy Test

The lobby of the Ninefold Tower was suddenly hard to breathe in.

Ruan Peizhi hadn’t moved. He stood with his hands folded over his belly and the jade ring on his thumb, smiling pleasantly, while the pressure of Shattering Void rolled out of him and pressed down on Shi Feng’s shoulders, forcing the nearby customers to retreat.

Customers near the pillars stepped back. A porter set down his crate and hurried away from it.

“Nothing rude, Brother Feng,” Ruan Peizhi said gently. “Wash the sand to find the gold. If you’re a real 3 Mark, you’ll still be standing straight when I’m done.”

Ruan Peizhi was a capital alchemist too. Shi Feng had heard his name in the salon. Two of his old clients had queued at the Willow Ford gate last month.

So this is about the clients, Shi Feng thought, amused. A man who can’t win the trade wants to win the lobby.

“I’d be happy to, Master Ruan,” Shi Feng said cheerfully, standing exactly as straight as before. “There’s just one thing. A courtesy test is only courteous if both sides are tested. Otherwise it’s just rudeness with a nicer name.”

“Then by all means, test me,” Ruan Peizhi said, and laughed.

Shi Feng opened his sleeve a little.

Since the day he’d walked through the river gate, he’d shown the capital a Soul Formation alchemist, and lately the Quiet Sleeve Art had kept it that way. Now he let his aura out. It rose past Soul Formation and kept rising, and it stopped at mid Deity Transformation, exactly where he told it to, and not one hair higher.

Ruan Peizhi’s pressure hit it and stopped dead.

The jade ring cracked on his thumb. Ruan Peizhi stumbled half a step back before he caught himself, and his face went from red to white and back to red.

The lobby was dead silent for one breath. Then it exploded.

“Deity Transformation?!”

“A frontier 3 Mark at Deity Transformation?”

“He was Soul Formation yesterday! I saw him myself!”

“He was hiding it in his sleeve this whole time!”

“…”

Shi Feng held it there for three more breaths, so that everyone would remember it properly. What lay underneath it stayed exactly where it was, where nobody would ever see it. Then he folded the aura away again.

“Thank you for the test, Master Ruan,” Shi Feng said warmly. “I passed. Did you?”

Ruan Peizhi opened his mouth, closed it, and walked out of the lobby without a word. Nobody stopped him.

From that day on, Ruan Peizhi never wore a jade thumb ring again.

The sitting desk stood at the far end of the lobby, under a lacquer board that read WINTER SITTING: DECLARATIONS. The clerk behind it had watched the whole thing without once changing his expression.

“Honoured guest,” the clerk said, bowing. “Which Mark do you declare?”

“The 4,” Shi Feng said.

The lobby, which had only just started breathing again, burst out laughing.

“Only the 4? After all that?”

“All that aura, and he sits the one Mark a frontier 3 Mark sits anyway!”

“Big thunder, small rain!”

Yuwen Dewei had stood very still since the ring cracked. Now he saw his chance to win his face back, and he stepped forward with his fan open.

“Since Brother Feng is so confident,” Yuwen Dewei said loudly, “let’s put it in the register. The sitting register has a wager page, doesn’t it, clerk?”

“It does, honoured guest,” the clerk said. “Any two parties may enter terms against a candidate’s line. The Pavilion witnesses and collects.”

Yuwen Dewei took the brush and wrote quickly, his circle crowding behind him. Then he turned the page around with a flourish.

Shi Feng picked it up and read it aloud with great relish, so the whole lobby could hear.

“Terms, between Yuwen Dewei of the capital and the candidate,” Shi Feng read. “One: if the candidate’s pill fails, the candidate apologises aloud in the Glass Hall and pays Yuwen Dewei three hundred thousand. Very fair. Two: if the candidate’s pill passes eight clouds, Yuwen Dewei and his circle bow to the candidate first, and pay him three hundred thousand.”

Eight clouds was Perfect. Yuwen Dewei had set a condition he was sure Shi Feng couldn’t meet.

“I accept,” Shi Feng said. “But Master Yuwen, you’ve written ‘apologise’ with a stroke missing.”

Yuwen Dewei’s face twitched.

“If I’m going to say it in front of the whole Glass Hall,” Shi Feng said kindly, handing back the brush, “I’d like it spelled properly.”

Somebody in the crowd laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

Yuwen Dewei added the stroke so hard the brush nearly went through the paper.

“The whole lobby heard the terms,” Shi Feng said, pleased. He pressed his thumb in the witness box beside Yuwen Dewei’s seal. “Now we both have the Pavilion’s record.”

The clerk blotted the page, turned it over and laid a fresh sheet on top. At the head of it, in red, were the words CANDIDATE’S LINE.

“The wager is entered, honoured guests. It is bound to the candidate’s line,” the clerk said. “Now, honoured guest, the candidate’s line itself. Pavilion law requires the true name, written in full.”

He held out a clean brush.

Shi Feng took it, and grinned.