Chapter 77 — The Tower's Receipt

CHAPTER 77

The Tower's Receipt

The first supplier who’d refused to sell to Shi Feng yesterday now hurried out to greet him. Shi Feng looked behind him for a rich customer.

The street was empty.

“Master Shi, this way,” Sun Ke said, pointing at a crate of herbs.

Shi Feng checked the sample, paid the price written on the lid, and took the parcel. Someone has decided the cripple has a powerful patron, he thought. And this merchant is too scared to ask who.

By midday, two more merchants found out that the shortage wasn’t so bad after all. One even offered credit.

“No credit,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll pay now.”

The merchant said that extending credit would be an honour.

“This lot will do,” Shi Feng said. He paid for the good herbs and left before the merchant could finish another compliment.

Fear isn’t loyalty, he thought. A good discount is just a good discount, and I’ll take it without pretending to be grateful.

Rumors of Zhou Mingde’s disgrace brought crowds to the stall, though curiosity didn’t always bring a purchase.

“That’s the cripple! His little jars ruined Zhou’s House!”

“Did he catch the thief himself?”

“Look at him! He can’t even lift a sword!”

“Then who makes his medicine?”

“…”

Shi Feng answered questions about use, storage and price. He told no story about a secret patron who’d avenged him. Other people were inventing plenty of stories already.

One honest customer hesitated over a sealed jar until the shadow of the awning crossed his hand. Shi Feng knew that look. The man wanted to believe, and he was afraid to.

The man admitted he had heard that it worked, but worried whether a peddler might change the mixture whenever a cheaper herb came along.

Shi Feng wasn’t offended. He’d met enough peddlers to share the worry. That afternoon he closed the stall early and carried a sealed sample to Sky Pavilion.

The capital tower rose above the roofs, and its upper windows caught the light long after the shops below were in shadow. Merchants passed under its gate and nobody bowed to them like lords. Well-dressed cultivators waited their turn beside men who’d come to pay for the examination of a single object.

Shi Feng went to the product assay hall. The clerk behind the counter wore a plain name token: Ji Wenzhao. He asked what Shi Feng wanted tested, not which grandmaster praised the medicine.

Shi Feng set down the jar.

“Medicine stability, stated ingredients and proper use,” Shi Feng said.

Ji Wenzhao checked the seal and handed over a printed list of charges.

“One tested sample doesn’t certify future batches,” Ji Wenzhao said. “It doesn’t certify the maker, and it definitely doesn’t give you a Mark.”

“That’s not what I’m buying,” Shi Feng said.

“Then write the batch description here,” Ji Wenzhao said.

Nobody needed to argue the point. Up a separate staircase, a notice listed the certification appointments. A 1 Mark alchemist made pills for Golden Core cultivators.

2 Marks meant pills for Nascent Soul, 3 Marks for Soul Formation, and so on up the ladder to the legendary Heavenly Mark. Candidates had to be at least Foundation Establishment. A Bone Refinement cultivator couldn’t even sit for the first test, Shi Feng thought.

Fine. A merchant’s jar belonged at a different counter anyway.

Shi Feng found the arrangement refreshing, and for the first time in the capital his heart felt light. He wrote down the medicine, its intended use and the lot of the sample. Ji Wenzhao sealed the entry, took the fee, and named the day the report would be ready.

No pulse check. No demand to prove he could refine. No insistence that a man who sold useful medicine must first prove every rumor about his body false.

While the assay ran, Shi Feng went back to the smaller furnace.

A private practice run was waiting. He tried the same common pill twice, changing the pace of the final joining stage. The first run produced two usable pills. The second produced one, and several crumbled pieces.

He compared the residue, swallowed it, and wrote down the difference.

Sky Pavilion can check a finished medicine, Shi Feng thought. It can’t lend me the qi quality I lack. His ordinary medicines were reliable because they stayed within what his present hands could do. Finer pills needed practice and honest limits, no matter how much expertise he remembered. He wouldn’t hang a receipt over a furnace and expect the receipt to do the work.

The report came before the evening bell.

Correct preparation. Stable properties. Ingredients matching the stated formula. The handling instructions and the sample’s limits were laid out clearly under the result.

“Show the whole statement,” Ji Wenzhao said.

Shi Feng read them and nodded. “If anyone dislikes them, he can bring his own sample,” Shi Feng said.

Ji Wenzhao handed back the leftover material. His expression stayed flat, and he said nothing more.

The next morning Shi Feng put the complete report up beside the tested lot. He kept that lot apart from his newer stock and matched the seals to the record.

“The Sky Pavilion tower tested it!” an old woman read aloud from the board. “It really works!”

“Real medicine from a cripple?” a young man said, stunned.

“The paper says so!”

Three customers bought without repeating the old argument about whether a cripple had any right to sell medicine. A fourth demanded the same price for a bigger jar. The tower’s receipt did nothing to stop the bargaining.

Gao Yuan heard about the assay by noon and showed up, yawning.

“Congratulations, Master Shi,” Gao Yuan said. “You should rent a better furnace room. Mine, maybe.”

Shi Feng knew that pitch well. Gao Yuan had already tried the same offer on Master Shen under his hood. He showed Gao Yuan the booking he’d already paid at the other yard.

The congratulations stayed free.

At home, Ling Qingzhu found the report on the table beside his accounts. She read the title first, then the findings, then the small print under them. Shi Feng watched from the kitchen doorway with a bowl in his hand, wondering what she’d decide.

“So the medicine is real,” Ling Qingzhu said, tapping the stamp. “Even the tower agrees with you.”

“It was real before the receipt,” Shi Feng said.

She looked up.

He didn’t sound offended enough for her to write his answer off as wounded pride. He sounded certain. The cream beside her mirror had already worked, and his explanations were already clear. Yet it was the tower’s ink that convinced her, she realized, and not either of those.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ling Qingzhu said, chin up, her expression daring him to argue.

“What did you mean?” Shi Feng asked.

She couldn’t find a graceful way to say her original sentence again. At last she handed him the paper and asked if the assay had been expensive. He named the fee.

“You should’ve bargained,” Ling Qingzhu said at once. “They’d have knocked off a fifth.”

Shi Feng looked at the tower’s fixed charges, then at her.

“…Fine, it’s a tower. They don’t bargain,” Ling Qingzhu said, and laughed in spite of herself. “They should, though.” It eased the moment, but not completely.

That night she drew the bed curtain and opened the scentless cream. Shi Feng lay on his bedding in the corner, pretending to count the ceiling beams, while she used a little before bed. The jar had no fancy seal. He’d made it because she disliked the smell of another cream, and it worked from the first evening.

How many other things have I waited for someone important to confirm? she wondered, in the dark, a few steps from the man on the floor.

Then she told herself that a wife couldn’t be expected to understand every detail of her husband’s trade.

The explanation was comfortable enough to keep.