Chapter 83 — The Payment That Was a Root

CHAPTER 83

The Payment That Was a Root

“Don’t throw that away,” Zhu Shan said, catching the empty lid. “My daughter painted it.”

Shi Feng looked at the red animal on the wood. Its four legs were different lengths.

“A tiger?” Shi Feng asked.

“A horse,” Zhu Shan replied stiffly.

Shi Feng wrapped the root in clean cloth and returned the box without another comment. The guard fitted the lid carefully. He looked far happier with it than with the little animal’s resemblance.

The completed order from Master Shen sat wrapped on the stall board, delivered by the peddler as far as Zhu Shan knew. The payment sat beside them, wrapped in cloth: a Golden Vein Root, knotted and crooked, with fine golden lines still clear beneath its skin. Shi Feng had asked for it himself before the pills were made.

Zhu Shan found it on the road while guarding a caravan, and it was a fine ingredient for the work Shi Feng was doing on his bones. A medicine shop would charge far more.

Zhu Shan pocketed his pills and left without another word. Ling Qingzhu happened to be standing beside the board. She watched the knotted root stay behind, and her expression turned puzzled.

“He paid you with that gnarled thing?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“Partly,” Shi Feng said.

“So someone finally out-bargained you,” Ling Qingzhu said, and the neighbouring stallkeepers perked up their ears.

“He paid a root and kept the box…”

“…”

Shi Feng unwrapped one end. The cut surface was clean, the golden veins hadn’t darkened, and Zhu Shan hadn’t swapped in a cheaper root after fixing the price.

“I asked for it,” Shi Feng said.

“Instead of spirit stones?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“Instead of buying it with more spirit stones,” Shi Feng said.

She fell silent. He checked the other end and wrapped it again. A root this good was hard to find, and he could use it himself without paying three merchants to pass it along. To her, a careful buyer was a greedy buyer. Yet the thought that he knew exactly what he was doing kept coming back, in small, annoying ways.

“It looks like something a dog dug up,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Lots of useful things do,” Shi Feng said.

She glanced at the little jar of cream in her sleeve. Then she hid it before he could see. Shi Feng saw anyway. He said nothing at all, though the corner of his mouth moved.

A man in a rich brown robe pushed through the crowd by the stall, holding out a paper.

“You’re the peddler who knows a private refiner?” Shao Fu demanded. “I’m Shao Fu. My uncle needs this pill. Can you get it?”

Shi Feng took the list and read it from top to bottom. The heavy herbs on it made his eyebrows lift.

“I can’t supply that,” Shi Feng said, and handed it back.

“I can pay!” Shao Fu said.

“That doesn’t change what I can supply,” Shi Feng said.

The ingredients weren’t the problem. Shi Feng knew the formula well, and Mo Tianheng’s experience showed him how to make far better pills. But his current qi couldn’t hold that preparation steady until it finished, and he refused to pretend otherwise. A good price wouldn’t turn a failed pill into medicine for anybody’s uncle, he thought.

Shao Fu’s face went red, and he doubled his offer. The crowd drew a sharp breath.

“Double!” someone whispered. “For one list!”

“He’ll take it. Anyone would.”

“Look at his face. He’s not taking it.”

Shi Feng shook his head and pointed Shao Fu toward the established medicine counters. The man left cursing, and the market stared after him, stunned. Ling Qingzhu turned to her husband, her expression astonished.

“He was willing to pay more,” Ling Qingzhu said, almost offended on the man’s behalf.

“He wanted something I can’t provide,” Shi Feng said.

“You didn’t even try to bargain,” Ling Qingzhu said. “Who are you, and what did you do with my husband?”

“Would that make his uncle any better?” Shi Feng asked.

She laughed, then shook her head. It was hard to call a man a swindler when he turned money away. She didn’t take back her earlier thought, but she stopped suggesting that he’d been cheated over the root.

At home, Shi Feng tucked the root into his corner of the room, under his rolled-up bedding, where it was out of her sight. His side had healed enough that a day of ordinary work no longer reopened the wound, though he still avoided any movement that pulled hard on the new flesh. He was powerful, he told himself, and that didn’t make rest foolish after fighting a mid Foundation Establishment cultivator.

Before sunset he took his plain wooden practice blade into the courtyard. The good sword was broken at the signal fort. For now, wood was enough to work through Xu Changhe’s teachings.

He thrust, turned the thrust into a short slash, and brought the point back toward the same opening. The first stroke was fast. The return was faster.

An enemy who dodged the first strike would meet the next before finding his footing. That was what the enforcer meant. Shi Feng repeated it until he no longer had to think about the turn of his wrist. He could crush many opponents with strength alone, he thought. Learning to use that strength properly would make the hard fights easier.

Ling Qingzhu was out collecting a letter, and nobody stood in the courtyard to ask why a cripple’s wooden blade sounded so sharp in the air.

That night, he prepared the root.

He waited on his floor bedding until Ling Qingzhu’s breathing slowed behind the bed curtain. Then he slipped out to the kitchen with the root, his cups and a single candle stub, and shut the door.

He didn’t try the impressive pill that Mo Tianheng might once have made from it. A simple medicinal preparation would give his body what it needed. He cut a small portion, added two cheaper ingredients and heated them slowly.

The first extraction came out too thin. He changed the water for the next portion instead of pretending it was good enough because the root was costly.

The second was right.

He drank the medicine and took a pill from his own stock. Warmth flowed through his body, and the golden traces in his bones grew brighter. More of the skeleton answered than before.

Not all of it.

Shi Feng thought: the golden bones are still unfinished, and the First Extreme is waiting beyond them. Only after finishing both could he enter Foundation Establishment. The tournament notice gave him a deadline, but he wouldn’t wreck his future by rushing toward it.

He opened his eyes and counted the root that remained. There was enough for more preparations. He wrapped it carefully, pleased with Zhu Shan’s payment, even though it added little to the purse he could spend tomorrow. Then he crept back to the floor without a sound and lay still. The bed creaked once. He held his breath until it stopped.

The next morning, in the kitchen, Ling Qingzhu opened Su Wanning’s latest letter. The ink was smudged and every line ran into the next.

Her friend was coming to the capital!

Su Wanning wanted to meet the husband properly, because letters weren’t enough. Did he really argue over rope?! Did he smile?! Had the cheaper meals gotten better? Did Qingzhu like him?! Was she blushing right now? She’d better be blushing!

“Bring the man to dinner,” the letter finished, “and I’ll decide whether he’s a treasure or a swindler!”

Ling Qingzhu’s ears went warm. A swindler. She couldn’t remember why that word had once seemed so reasonable.

Ling Qingzhu frowned at the other line. She remembered writing it. Somehow it sounded far worse when someone else repeated it.

From the courtyard came the soft clink of Shi Feng rinsing his cups at the well.

Ling Qingzhu looked toward it, and her heart began to turn over a plan: one evening that would prove something she hadn’t yet decided how to name.