Chapter 695 — The Ledger Year Closes

CHAPTER 695

The Ledger Year Closes

“Ninth day of winter,” Zhu Liu said, and dipped his brush. “The ledger year is closed.”

He drew a line across the bottom of the Artificer Hall’s account book, very straight, and blotted it twice. Then he turned to the small red book beside it, the one Gongsun Ce had opened eleven months ago.

The ledger room was cold. Snow sat on the window ledge, and the whole Hall seemed to have squeezed in anyway, disciples packed shoulder to shoulder along the shelves to watch.

“Item one,” Zhu Liu read nervously. “Senior Brother Lin Langtian bets that Junior Brother Shi Feng returns before the year is out, with more than he left with. The year is out. Junior Brother Shi Feng has not returned.” He swallowed. “Senior Brother Lin loses.”

Every head turned to the doorway.

Lin Langtian stood there with his arms folded, in a robe so bright it hurt to look at. He didn’t argue. He stepped forward, threw back his sleeve and slapped a pouch on the table so hard that Zhu Liu’s ink jumped.

“YOURS TRULY HAS LOST!” Lin Langtian roared. “Everyone, look! Come and look! Five hundred stones, in full! Count it, Zhu Liu! Count it out loud!”

“Senior Brother, you don’t need to shout,” Zhu Liu said, flinching.

“I do need to shout!” Lin Langtian said. “When Yours Truly pays, the mountain hears it! Gongsun Ce! Take your money before I change my mind!”

Gongsun Ce took the pouch, weighed it, and put it in his sleeve without counting.

“Thank you, Senior Brother,” Gongsun Ce said mildly. “And the other book?”

“What other book?” Lin Langtian demanded.

“Comes back with less,” Gongsun Ce said. “That one’s still open. He hasn’t come back at all, so it can’t be settled.”

“Then leave it open!” Lin Langtian said. “Leave it open until it rots!”

Zhu Liu wrote, Item two: open, in small characters. Then he looked up timidly.

“Senior Brother, the Empire post came this morning,” Zhu Liu said. “There’s nothing from him. No letter. No parcel.”

For one breath, Lin Langtian didn’t say anything.

“Of course there isn’t,” Lin Langtian said, and laughed loudly. “The brat’s busy. He’s probably fleecing somebody’s grandfather. Write that down too, small characters.”

He walked out laughing, and the disciples let him through.

Hut nine was exactly as it had been left.

Lin Langtian pushed the door open with his foot and dropped a travelling bag on the bare bed. He packed quickly and silently. There was none of his usual shouting now, and he checked each item before putting it in. A change of robes. A water gourd. A rope. A folded map of the continent with a line drawn on it in charcoal from the frontier into the north.

Li Changyuan went past the open door with his broom, sweeping snow off the path.

The old man stopped and looked in at the bag. Lin Langtian looked back at him.

For nearly two years, every time Lin had reached for a bag, someone had told him to sit down.

Li Changyuan said nothing. He had seen the travelling bag and the route on the map. This time he didn’t object, and Lin Langtian didn’t ask him to explain. The broom moved on along the path.

Lin Langtian tied the bag shut, set it by the door, and sat down on the bed beside it with his elbows on his knees.

Sima Lan came up the path behind the broom with her ledger under one arm and Old Soot on her shoulder. She looked at the bag by the door, and at the map sticking out of it.

“One travelling bag, one rope, one map,” Sima Lan said crisply, and wrote it down. “I’ll put it on his bill.”

“Whose bill?” Lin Langtian asked.

“His,” Sima Lan said. “Everything is on his bill.”

She walked on without waiting for an answer.

“He owes me five hundred stones now,” Lin Langtian said quietly to the empty hut. “With interest.”

Down the path, the side door of the Hall stood unlocked, as it had every night since the Lantern Festival. Sima Lan had written it in her ledger as a standing item. Nobody had ever crossed it out.

On the same ninth day of winter, in Tianjing, Auntie Niu’s grandson sat on the bun stall’s step at dusk and counted the last tray of buns aloud.

“Thirty-one. Thirty-two,” Niu Tiezhu counted, pointing at each bun so he wouldn’t miss one.

“Thirty-three,” Ji Yuanhe said beside him, and the boy laughed and kept going.

Half the lane had stopped to listen. A water-seller set down his buckets. Two old women counted along under their breath.

Shi Feng leaned in the courtyard doorway and listened. Ji Yuanhe wasn’t whispering into a furnace now. The boy beside him wanted to hear the next number, and so did the neighbours.

“Forty,” Niu Tiezhu shouted, and the lane cheered as if he’d passed a Mark.

[Mark: 4 | Note: they listen to the counting now.]