Chapter 691 — Clouds Five to Nine

CHAPTER 691

Clouds Five to Nine

“Five clouds!” the board-caller announced. “The 4 Mark line is reached!”

It was the afternoon of the second day. A Pavilion clerk in grey stood at the great cloud board on the hall’s wall, with a brush in one hand and a tally stick in the other. Above Mo’s cauldron, five white clouds hung under the glass roof, one on top of another.

The upper rings stirred.

“He passes. Fine. A pass is a pass,” Yuwen Dewei said loudly, fanning himself. “Every capital apprentice passes at five.”

“Every capital apprentice sits the 2 Mark, Brother Yuwen,” someone beside him muttered.

Yuwen Dewei pretended not to hear.

Beside the stand, Ji Yuanhe was counting under his breath. It wasn’t the clouds he counted. It was the cauldron’s notes, the Pit’s rhythm, every number the same length as the last. His thin hands lay flat on his knees and didn’t move.

“Seven hundred and four,” Ji Yuanhe whispered. “Seven hundred and five.”

Shi Feng turned the lid a quarter on the beat. The steam folded down, held, and let go.

“Six clouds!” the board-caller called. “Major Success!”

This time the gallery didn’t wait for Yuwen.

“Six at a 4 Mark sitting? Half the 4 Marks in the register stopped at five!”

“The youngest living 4 Mark was forty-one when he sat!”

“How old is this bumpkin?”

“The register says twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two? Impossible!”

Shi Feng fed in the last root of dragon-vein moss and listened to the pot. It was humming lower now, and the lid trembled against his palm, as if something under it wanted to stand up.

Not yet, Shi Feng told it. Sit down. We’re not done eating.

“Seven clouds!” the board-caller announced, raising his tally stick.

Yuwen Dewei’s fan stopped moving.

An old man in the lowest ring, a Deity Transformation guest with a white beard to his belt, leaned forward on his cane.

“Bamboo shoots after spring rain,” the old guest said quietly to his neighbour.

Nobody in the upper rings was laughing now. Ruan Peizhi sat two seats from Yuwen with his arms folded so tightly his sleeves had wrinkled.

The eighth cloud took a long time. It formed thin, broke apart, and formed again, while the whole hall leaned toward the glass.

“Eight clouds!” the board-caller shouted, and his voice cracked. “Perfect!”

Yuwen Dewei lost his smile. His mouth stayed half open. He reached for the wager folded in his sleeve, then stopped, too ashamed to let the men beside him see him check it.

Eight clouds, Shi Feng thought happily. The wager’s condition was met: they’d bow first and pay three hundred thousand.

He looked up at the second ring and smiled.

“Master Yuwen,” Shi Feng called pleasantly, “will you be paying in stones or in silver notes? I’d like to clear a space on the counter.”

“Candidate,” Song Wuya said from the examiners’ bench, without looking up from his book. “The sitting is not a market.”

“Yes, Eldest Examiner,” Shi Feng said. “Sorry, Eldest Examiner. It’s just a very quiet one.”

Someone in the lowest ring laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

Yuwen Dewei didn’t say anything at all.

Shi Feng turned back to the cauldron. The joke was over, and he forgot it at once. The hum had gone deeper. It was the Deity Transformation weight his notes had warned about: the pill under the lid wanted to rise, and it would rise through bronze if he let it.

He laid his palm flat on the lid and pressed.

“Nine,” Ji Yuanhe whispered.

The ninth cloud opened over the glass.

The board-caller forgot to call it. He stood at the board with his brush lifted and his mouth open. Nobody reminded him. Three rings of capital alchemists, examiners and guests sat without a sound, and the only voice in the Glass Hall was a thin old man on a stool, counting.

“Nine hundred and twelve. Nine hundred and thirteen,” Ji Yuanhe counted, keeping the same steady pace.

Then the nine clouds began to darken.

They went grey at the edges first, then grey all through, then black. The glass roof creaked as the light in the hall turned the colour of a storm.

“A pill tribulation,” an examiner said hoarsely. “At a 4 Mark sitting?”

The white-bearded guest gripped his cane.

“The mountain rain is coming,” the old guest murmured. “The wind already fills the tower.”

The tribulation fell.

It didn’t fall on the hall. The sitting array lit along the floor in a ring of pale lines, and the lightning came down inside it, a single column of white fire onto Mo’s cauldron and nowhere else. The heat rolled out across the stand in a wave. The examiners’ bench, ten paces away, felt it and flinched back.

Ji Yuanhe didn’t move from his stool.

“Nine hundred and twenty,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shi Feng rolled his sleeves to the elbow, one and then the other, keeping the loose cloth away from the fire.

Then he stepped into the heat.