Chapter 692 — The Second Sky

CHAPTER 692

The Second Sky

The first sky burned out in forty breaths.

Shi Feng stood in the middle of it with both palms on the lid. The heat soaked through his robe and into his arms, and his sleeves smoked at the rolled edges. Under his hands the pill hummed like a struck bell and pushed upward, again and again.

When the white fire thinned, the black clouds didn’t leave.

They drew together over the glass roof instead, and a second layer began to form above the first.

“A second sky,” an examiner said. His voice had gone very small. “It’s calling a second sky.”

The gallery broke.

“Two tribulations? For a 4 Mark pill?”

“That’s never been in the register!”

“He’ll burn the hall down!”

“The array will hold. The array will hold, won’t it?”

“...”

The white-bearded guest in the lowest ring didn’t shout. He sat back on his bench and let out a long breath.

“The ink is not yet dry,” the old guest said.

The pill pushed again, harder. The lid lifted a hair under his palms, and a thin line of light leaked out round its rim. His hands alone weren’t going to hold it through a second sky. The bronze was too hot, and the pill was too heavy.

Keep the lid steady, Shi Feng told himself. Raising it would release the pill too soon; pressing too hard would ruin the fire. He needed the steam to bear part of the load.

He breathed in with the cauldron’s next note, and on the beat he folded the steam.

It came up from the furnace bed, a few feet of white steam, and curled over the lid like a second hand laid on top of his. It held. On the next note he folded it again, tighter, and on the next note tighter still, until the steam lay pressed over the bronze in a smooth grey skin that moved with the beat and didn’t tear.

That was it. The steam followed each note without his having to correct its shape. Mo’s Steam Fold had stopped being something he did. It was simply how the steam behaved now.

Major Success, Shi Feng thought. So it needed a second sky to teach it. Fine. I’ll take the lesson.

“Nine hundred and sixty,” Ji Yuanhe said beside him, steady as a clerk.

The second sky fell.

It came down heavier than the first, in a column so bright that the glass roof turned white and three rows of guests threw their sleeves over their eyes. The array lines on the floor blazed. The stand shook under his boots. For twenty breaths there was nothing but fire and noise and the cauldron singing Mo’s count, and under it Ji’s voice, never louder and never softer.

Then the light went out.

The clouds above the roof broke apart and faded, and grey winter daylight came back down through the glass. The pill under the lid gave one last low hum and went still.

Song Wuya stood up from the examiners’ bench. He was the first to move.

“Two tribulations,” Song Wuya said. “Survived.”

The hall was too stunned to cheer. People just looked at each other, and then at the cauldron, and then at the boy in the burnt sleeves.

“A Two-Tribulation Pill,” a guest whispered. “At a 4 Mark sitting.”

Shi Feng lifted the lid.

Three pills lay in the bowl. One was dark gold and moved faintly, as if it were breathing. One was a clean, pale Perfect pill. The third was a grey, cracked lump, a waste pill that had lost its share of the herbs to the other two.

He reached in, took the Perfect pill between two fingers and held it up to the light for the examiners. While every eye in the hall followed his right hand, his left went into the bowl and came out empty, and the grey lump was already in his sleeve.

The Quiet Sleeve Art had cost him nine hundred thousand. Worth every copper.

A senior examiner came forward with a jade tray and took the dark gold pill in tongs. He lifted it, and his wrist dipped, as if the tongs held a stone.

“A 4 Mark pill,” the senior examiner said slowly, “of unusual weight.”

“Two pills,” the clerk said, writing fast. “The Perfect is kept for the record by contract. The Two-Tribulation Pill returns to the candidate.”

“And the waste?” Song Wuya asked.

“There wasn’t any, Eldest Examiner,” Shi Feng said. “The pot was hungry.”

Song Wuya looked at the empty bowl, and then at Shi Feng’s sleeves, for one breath longer than he needed to. Then he wrote something in his book and said nothing.

Back in his room at the Guest Terrace, past midnight, Shi Feng ate the grey lump in two bites.

The fever came within the hour. It was a Deity Transformation pill’s worth of herbs, two skies of fire still in the slag, and his Physique took every bit of it and burned. He lay on the floor bedding and sweated through two blankets.

Shi Feng shivered hard enough to shake the blankets. The residue held more heat than he could settle at once.

Ji Yuanhe sat by the wall with a basin and a cloth.

“Is it bad?” Ji Yuanhe asked.

“It is,” Shi Feng said through his teeth. “But I can bear it. Don’t stop counting, Master Ji.”

Ji Yuanhe counted him through it, softly, until the window turned grey.

At dawn a Pavilion runner knocked and bowed at the door.

“Honoured guest,” the runner said. “The register is read tonight at the night bell. The Eldest Examiner asks that you come in sleeves that aren’t burnt.”