Chapter 809 — The Antidote Nobody Paid For

CHAPTER 809

The Antidote Nobody Paid For

“What are you doing?” Hou Tieshou asked, staring at the hand on his leg.

“Taking it out,” Shi Feng said. “Lie back and don’t move.”

He opened the All-Devouring Physique under his palm, just a little.

It didn’t care what it ate. Qi, metal, waste pills, a palm art that rotted bones: it had swallowed all of them before. Shi Feng felt it at once, cold and greasy, creeping up the thighbone, and began drawing it out through the puncture in the skin.

The grey under Hou Tieshou’s skin stopped spreading.

Then, slowly, it began to move the other way. A thin black thread rose from the torn flesh and disappeared into his hand.

Yue Shaoan stopped breathing. Jiao Lanyin leaned closer and didn’t say a word.

The poison went up Shi Feng’s arm into his own bones and looked for marrow to rot. It found golden bone, and stopped. It couldn’t find anything there to eat. After a while, the physique ate it instead.

It took the time of half an incense stick. When he lifted his hand, Hou Tieshou’s thigh was red, swollen and ugly, but it was the colour of living flesh again from the hip to the knee.

Hou Tieshou flexed his toes. Then his ankle. Then his knee. Then he made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.

“It’s moving!” Hou Tieshou shouted. “It’s my leg again! Brother Shi, how did you—”

“A frontier trick,” Shi Feng said. “We get a lot of snakes down south. Go to sleep.”

“That wasn’t a snake!” Hou Tieshou protested, still staring at the leg he had expected to lose.

“I know,” Shi Feng said, too tired to keep up the excuse. “You’ve seen that I can treat it. That’s enough for tonight. Rest the leg.”

Jiao Lanyin looked at his palm. It was clean, without a mark on it. Then she looked at his face for a long moment.

“You’re lying,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“Yes,” Shi Feng agreed. “Go to sleep as well.”

She didn’t argue. She turned her back and sat facing the fog with her bow on her knees, and she didn’t ask him anything else that night.

The poison didn’t hurt his bones. An hour after midnight, his stomach cramped painfully, and he spent the rest of the night sitting very still on the edge of the island with sweat running down his back, while the physique ground the last of the Myriad Marrow’s work into nothing.

[Devoured: Bone-Marrow poison, one needle’s worth | Gain: nothing | Note: cramps until dawn.]

“Are you all right?” Yue Shaoan whispered, some time before dawn.

“My stomach’s still sore,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll be all right. Check Hou Tieshou’s leg when he wakes, and make sure he doesn’t start running on it.”

At dawn, the seventh Mirror outside the Antler Gate showed the wardens’ post on the north edge of the marsh. A small crowd had already gathered in front of it with steamed buns, waiting for the day’s first news.

They got it. Five hunters in plum-red came out of the fog onto the post’s wooden landing, limping and leaning on one another. At their head walked Shangguan Ruo of the Myriad Marrow. Her left sleeve was torn away, and her arm was black from the shoulder to the elbow.

“That’s Shangguan Ruo! Fifty-second on the Tianxing!”

“What happened to her arm?”

“That’s Bone-Marrow poison. That’s her own sect’s poison!”

“They’re giving up their tokens. The whole banner’s walking out!”

“…”

A Tianji scribe standing by the post wrote something down. The wardens took five jade tokens from five hunters, and a warden in brown bowed and handed Shangguan Ruo a cup of antidote. She drank it in one swallow and threw the cup in the marsh.

Hou Tieshou woke up in full daylight, sat straight up and stamped his bad leg on the ground three times. It held. It hurt, but it held.

“Survive a great disaster, and good fortune follows,” Yue Shaoan said, with tears in his eyes.

Hou Tieshou didn’t even hear him. He crawled across the island on his knees, grabbed Shi Feng’s hands in both of his and shook them up and down.

“Brother Shi! I owe you my life!” Hou Tieshou bellowed. “A drop of kindness is repaid with a gushing spring! I swear it on my ancestors!”

Before anyone could stop him, Hou Tieshou had his belt knife out. He cut the pad of his thumb, pressed the blood into the mud of the island, and said his father’s name and his mother’s village aloud, and swore by both.

“I don’t swear oaths,” Shi Feng said. “Not to you, and not to anyone. When I give my word, I keep it. My word doesn’t need blood in the mud to hold it.” His stomach was still sore. “Get up. You can work it off.”

“It’s a big debt!” Hou Tieshou said. Then he frowned and scratched his head. “But it’s very big. Can I pay it in installments?”

“You can’t pay for a life in installments!” Yue Shaoan said.

“Why not? My uncle paid for his house that way!” Hou Tieshou protested.

“Installments are fine,” Shi Feng said. “The first one’s due today. You carry every core this banner takes, and you carry me if I fall over. I’m not lifting anything heavier than a cup until my stomach settles.”

Hou Tieshou beamed and thumped his chest.

“Done!” Hou Tieshou said, and immediately loaded every core they had into his own pack, along with half of Yue Shaoan’s.

Jiao Lanyin watched him and then looked at Shi Feng.

“The needle,” Jiao Lanyin said. “You still have it.”

“I do,” Shi Feng said.

“She’ll want it back,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“I won’t give it back,” Shi Feng said, feeling the wrapped needle through his ring. “I want to examine the poison when I have time. It could help if she comes after this banner again.”