Chapter 744 — The Backlog

CHAPTER 744

The Backlog

“Why’s your gate barred in broad daylight?” Auntie Niu shouted over the wall. “Are you sick? Are you hiding a woman in there? Tiezhu says you bought a whole sack of charcoal and no herbs!”

“I’m eating, Auntie,” Shi Feng called back.

“Eating what? I didn’t sell you anything!” Auntie Niu shouted.

“Leftovers,” Shi Feng said.

There was a suspicious silence on the other side of the wall.

“Leftovers from where?” Auntie Niu demanded.

“From the stall round,” Shi Feng said.

“That was half a month ago! You’ll poison yourself!” Auntie Niu shouted. A pause followed. “I’ll leave buns on the step. Don’t make me climb over.”

Shi Feng laughed, carefully, with one hand pressed to his ribs.

Four days. The banquet was in four days, and after the banquet came the Lake Stage. Gu Yanxing was peak Deity Transformation. Situ Jinghong was peak. Qu Ming was peak and sixty-fourth, and he had fire. Shi Feng had fought Tang Mingyu from one stage below and come home with cracked ribs. He could beat stronger opponents, but he wasn’t going to enter those bouts injured and give them that advantage. There was no reason to leave the gap open.

So he would close the gap first.

On his floor bedding, beside a lacquer tray, sat the backlog in a clay jar.

For seven days in the West Market he’d refined in the street outside the stall, from dawn until the lamps were lit, while the Tang shop across the lane sold its false labels. Most of those pills had gone across the counter. But not every furnace succeeds, even his, and thirty-eight had come out as waste, cracked, scorched or lumpy and grey. Anyone else who swallowed one would be sick for a month. He’d dropped every one of them into the jar.

Every waste pill still held the full qi of its herbs, and all thirty-eight were Deity Transformation-grade.

He tipped them out onto the tray. They lay there in a row, brown and ugly.

Ji Yuanhe dragged a bucket over to the kitchen door, turned it upside down and sat on it with a blanket round his shoulders. He didn’t ask what Shi Feng was doing.

“I’ll count,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“You don’t have to anymore,” Shi Feng said. “You sleep without it now.”

“I know,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Tonight I want to. You listened to me during the bout. Listen again.”

Shi Feng looked at him for a moment. Ji Yuanhe meant it. Counting no longer had to be something he did just to endure the night. He wanted to help, and Shi Feng wouldn’t dismiss that.

“Then count,” Shi Feng said. “One for each pill. Slowly.”

“Slowly,” Ji Yuanhe agreed. “Hurry, and you never arrive. One.”

Shi Feng ate the first pill.

It tasted of ash and bitter root, as waste pills always did. Then the All-Devouring Physique opened, and the pill’s qi went down into him all at once, warm and heavy. He took in every herb in it at its exact worth, no more and no less.

It went down past his core and past the deity at his centre, and settled into the pagoda that housed it.

The pagoda had nine layers. Nobody in the world knew that but him. Seven layers was a legend. He’d built nine at his tribulation, and ever since, he’d been filling them slowly, a little at a time.

The first pill’s worth spread across the lowest layer and was gone.

“Two,” Ji Yuanhe said.

He ate the second.

By the tenth, the sun had gone down behind the willow. By the fifteenth, the courtyard was dark, and Ji Yuanhe had lit the lamp without breaking his count. Sweat ran down Shi Feng’s face in the cold. His stomach had started cramping around the twelfth pill, and the cramp wasn’t going away. Waste pills fought all the way down. They always did.

He slowed his breathing before reaching for the next pill. Eating too quickly would make him vomit, wasting the herbs he still needed. He’d endure the cramping and keep each measure down.

“Sixteen,” Ji Yuanhe said.

At the second watch, Auntie Niu’s voice came over the wall again, softly for once.

“Is he still eating?” Auntie Niu asked.

“Yes, Auntie,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“Silly boy. A fat man isn’t made in one mouthful,” Auntie Niu muttered. Something wrapped in cloth thumped down on the step. “Ginger buns, for the stomach. Don’t tell him I didn’t charge.”

By the twentieth pill, the warmth inside him had turned to heat. The lower layers of the pagoda were full, then fuller. The qi had nowhere left to spread, so it began to climb, layer by layer. His ribs throbbed with every heartbeat. The cracks were warm too. The qi was finding them, as it found everything.

At the twenty-second pill, his hands began to shake.

“Twenty-two,” Ji Yuanhe said steadily. “Breathe.”

Shi Feng breathed. He picked up the twenty-third and ate it, and then sat very still.

The qi had reached the top. The highest three layers of the pagoda were filling now, and they were heavier than anything below them had been built to carry. They leaned. He felt them lean inside his chest, all three together, and then swing back. A sound came up through his bones that nobody else in the courtyard could hear, a long, low groan of stone on stone.

Shi Feng’s breath caught. Ji Yuanhe’s count stopped for the first time that night.

“Don’t stop,” Shi Feng said hoarsely. “Whatever happens, keep counting. There are fifteen more.”

“…Twenty-three,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Inside the pagoda, the top three layers swayed again, and this time they didn’t swing back on their own.