Chapter 693 — The Register and the Bow

CHAPTER 693

The Register and the Bow

The night bell rang, and the register clerk opened the book.

The Glass Hall was full again, but quieter than at any point in the sitting. Lamps hung under the glass roof. The examiners sat in their black robes in a row, and Song Wuya sat in the middle with his ink-stained thumbs folded on the bench.

Shi Feng stood before the register desk in clean sleeves. Ji Yuanhe stood one step behind him.

The clerk wet his brush, stamped the page, and read aloud.

“Entered at the Ninefold Tower, Winter Onset. The 4 Mark, for pills of the Deity Transformation realm. Holder: Shi Feng.”

A murmur ran round the rings.

“Read it again,” Song Wuya said.

“Holder: Shi Feng,” the clerk read. “Age, twenty-two. Realm, Deity Transformation. Sect, none.”

So that’s what it sounds like, Shi Feng thought. My own name, read out loud in the capital, in front of the people who laughed at it. He found he liked the sound very much.

Song Wuya stood and took the register from the clerk.

“Three entries for the record,” Song Wuya said, in his dry, flat voice. “First. The youngest holder of the 4 Mark in this register. Second. Nine clouds at a 4 Mark sitting. Third. The first Two-Tribulation Pill ever made at a 4 Mark sitting.”

He set the book down.

For a moment nobody moved. Then, in the lowest ring, the white-bearded Deity Transformation guest put his cane on the floor and stood up.

The Soul Formation guests beside him rose next. Then the rest of the lowest ring stood up, row by row. The senior examiners on the bench got to their feet last.

The upper rings stared down at the guests standing below them. They’d never seen anything like it.

“They’re standing. For a 4 Mark!”

“That old ancestor doesn’t stand for his own sect master!”

“…”

Song Wuya sat back down, dipped his brush, and wrote one more line in the remarks column. Shi Feng read it upside down.

Sat alone. No sect. His own name. By his own choice.

“The wager,” Song Wuya said, without looking up. “Master Yuwen.”

Yuwen Dewei came down from the second ring with his circle behind him, six capital alchemists in fine robes. The hall watched every step. He stopped before the register desk, and his face was grey.

“I wrote that if the pill passed eight clouds, we bow first,” Yuwen Dewei said stiffly. “It passed nine.”

He bowed first, deeply. His circle bowed behind him, one after another, each waiting for the man in front to straighten.

“The swan doesn’t keep company with crows,” Yuwen Dewei said to the floor.

Then he took a pouch from his sleeve and counted out three hundred thousand in stone notes onto the register desk.

Shi Feng picked up the notes and counted them. Then he counted them again, slowly, one by one, in front of Yuwen and all six of his friends.

“Three hundred thousand,” Shi Feng said warmly. “That’s exactly right. You’re an honest man, Master Yuwen. Not everyone counts that well.”

He signed the receipt the clerk slid across, blew on the ink, and handed it to Yuwen with both hands.

“Thank you for your custom,” Shi Feng said. “Please come again.”

Yuwen Dewei’s lips trembled, but no sound came out. He took the receipt and walked out of the hall without looking back.

Seven million, near enough, Shi Feng thought. And the receipt proved the payment belonged to the witnessed wager. Nobody could turn it into a claim of extortion later.

The hall emptied slowly. A few capital alchemists hung back at the doors, waiting until the crowd had gone. Then they came over one at a time and spoke quietly.

“Master Shi, would your schedule allow a consultation?”

“A small matter, only one furnace. When it’s convenient.”

“I’d pay the booking fee in advance, of course.”

Shi Feng wrote their names down in his book, cheerfully, with prices. From the corner of his eye he saw Ruan Peizhi pass the doors without stopping. Ruan Peizhi didn’t look at him. He didn’t book anything.

Later that night, alone in his room at the Guest Terrace, Shi Feng unlocked a small iron box.

Inside it, wrapped in oiled paper, lay one pill. It was a 5 Mark-grade pill, for Shattering Void, the one from the fourth bud. It had raised six clouds in a sealed hall on Alchemists’ Row in the summer, on Ji Yuanhe’s count, and stopped there. Six clouds was a pass at a 5 Mark sitting.

He weighed it on his palm.

I could sit it, Shi Feng thought. Declare it before the first bell of the next eve, sign the same name and stand in that hall again. They’d read the register twice more.

He imagined it, and then he imagined the morning after: the 5 Mark, at twenty-two, in a capital where the Heretic Sect had known his name for days. A 4 Mark could be a lucky bumpkin. A 5 Mark at twenty-two could only be one thing, and every sect in the Empire would come to ask what.

Too much, Shi Feng thought.

He wrapped the pill back up in its oiled paper.

Not yet. Not until he could stand up to whoever came next. When he sat again, it wouldn’t be one Mark. It would be two.

He didn’t say any of it aloud. Nobody in the capital knew what he meant to do with it, Ji Yuanhe included. He locked it, put the key on its cord round his neck, and lay down on the floor bedding.

Tomorrow, the Records Hall would have to answer a 4 Mark.