Chapter 69 — Master Shen

CHAPTER 69

Master Shen

“Your hood’s caught,” Gao Yuan said around a yawn.

Shi Feng stopped. The cloth had hooked on a bent nail in the gate. He eased it free without exposing his face.

Gao Yuan watched from his stool. He wore one boot and held the other beneath his arm. A tenant behind him was shouting about a cold furnace.

“Lower vent!” Gao Yuan shouted back. “You shut the lower vent!”

The shouting stopped. Gao Yuan pushed a rental sheet across the table and finally put his boot on. Shi Feng read the room and fuel rates, paid the deposit, and waited for the key.

The yard stood behind a metalworking lane, and the whole place rang with hammers. Shi Feng had come in a plain hood and a face cloth, after changing the outer robe he wore at the medicine stall. The precautions were simple.

He knew no art of concealment and saw no reason to invent one. He only wanted the man at the stall and the man at the furnace to remain two separate people. No one in the capital—not Ling Qingzhu at home, not Gao Yuan at the furnace yard, and not a single customer in the market—knew that the medicine peddler Shi Feng and the hooded refiner Master Shen were the same man.

“Name?” Gao Yuan asked.

“Shen Mo,” Shi Feng said.

The false name went onto the sheet.

“Certification mark?” Gao Yuan asked.

“None claimed,” Shi Feng said. “I’m renting a furnace, not applying for an honour.”

Gao Yuan’s expression brightened as he weighed the deposit in his palm and decided that was answer enough. He was a Qi Condensation cultivator who owned furnaces, not an alchemy master, and a paying tenant interested him far more than a debate about marks.

“Fine, Master Shen,” Gao Yuan said. “Third room on the left. The furnace is... well loved.”

Well loved was the right phrase. The furnace was far worse than the price promised! Shi Feng found a blocked channel before he even set down his ingredients, and a crust of old metal residue clung to the inner wall.

Mo Tianheng’s knowledge named both faults at once. It didn’t make scraping them off any less filthy!

“Gao Yuan,” Shi Feng called through the door. “Come and look.”

Gao Yuan shuffled over, rubbing his eyes. Shi Feng showed him the residue before touching it.

“This was here when I came,” Shi Feng said. “Sign that, or you’ll find a damage charge the day I leave.”

“Too early for this!” Gao Yuan groaned, and signed without reading it.

Shi Feng shut the door. He cleaned the channel, sealed off the stained section, and tested the heat with no medicine inside. The furnace rose unevenly. He noted how long the chamber took to answer after he moved the lower vent.

Knowing was easy. Doing was another matter!

He chose a common recovery preparation, far below the refinements Mo Tianheng once performed without a second thought. The herbs were cheap and every change was clear in his mind. But his own qi failed at the joining stage.

His first two trial runs in the larger furnace broke apart at the joining stage whenever his Bone Refinement current surged too hard for the remembered method. Raw combat force did nothing for a pill that needed gentle, steady heat, so he split the process into smaller stages and adjusted one variable at a time.

“Slower, you fool,” Shi Feng said to himself in the empty room. “Slower!”

He split the work into stages. Extraction first. Then a steady thread over plain liquid. Then the joining movement, with just enough medicine to show whether the thread held.

At the familiar failure point he stopped chasing the master’s effortless pace. He changed one thing at a time and never two.

The process improved. It didn’t give him a finished pill.

When the session ended, the tray held useful failures, spent ash, and a short record of what his hands could carry today. He ate the failures that still held medicine and left the dead ash for the waste pot. The All-Devouring Physique took in the nourishment cleanly. No resistance dulled it, and no poison made the practice a debt against his future body.

Fuel, herbs, and rent were still debts against his purse. When he opened the door, Gao Yuan appeared at once. His eyes went to the covered containers.

“A share of product is customary,” Gao Yuan said.

Shi Feng held up the signed rental sheet.

“Then you should have written the custom,” Shi Feng said.

Gao Yuan read the sheet, and his expression fell. “Ah... too much trouble to fix now,” Gao Yuan muttered.

The second visit went little better. The third produced one round pellet with an unbound centre. Shi Feng cut it open, studied it, and put both halves among his own waste.

I won’t sell a shape just because someone can be persuaded to admire it, he thought.

He also stopped before exhaustion could make the next record meaningless. Practising while his qi was thin taught a different limit than practising fresh. Mo Tianheng’s memories let him see the difference, but only his own notes could show where it began in this body. He marked the resting time beside the failures. A dead man’s endurance was no excuse to lie about his own.

Between visits, the stall paid for the work. Ointments and washes needed skills he could already carry out, and pill practice ate a part of the profits, then returned something to his cultivation even when it failed.

It was slower than finding a master’s spirit and becoming rich overnight. It was also real.

“Master Shen,” Gao Yuan called one evening, stretching. “A hammer-man asked about the famous refiner in the third room.”

“There’s no famous refiner,” Shi Feng said.

“Hm. I told him there was,” Gao Yuan said, and wandered off, too lazy to argue.

Shi Feng corrected no harmless title, but he claimed no mark and showed no face. Private clients, if any came, would hear honest terms about what he could really make.

At home that evening, Ling Qingzhu wrinkled her nose.

“Why do you smell of furnace smoke?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“Because I was near a furnace,” Shi Feng said.

“That’s the most useless answer I’ve ever heard,” Ling Qingzhu said, frowning at him.

He thought it admirably accurate.

“Then hang that robe outside,” Ling Qingzhu said, pointing at the courtyard. “We share one room, remember? I’m not sleeping in a smithy.” She turned away.

“Fine. The pear tree can have it,” Shi Feng said.

She sniffed once more and went to the kitchen, and he heard the lid of a pot rattle with more force than the pot deserved. When he came back from washing, his bowl stood covered beside the stove. She had stopped waiting for him to explain his profession until the rice went cold.

Shi Feng lifted the lid and paused. She had even kept it warm!

Then he ate, wrote down another day’s limits, and planned the next attempt.