Chapter 830 — Ji Yuanhe Counts to Nothing

CHAPTER 830

Ji Yuanhe Counts to Nothing

Ji Yuanhe opened the door in his sleeping robe, white hair standing up on one side.

“Thirty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said, looking at the jade bottle. It was the number of steps from the courtyard gate to his door. He’d counted Shi Feng’s footsteps through the paper.

“Sit down, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said. “Take this. Then sleep.”

Ji Yuanhe sat on his bedding and tipped the pale pill into his palm. He looked at it for a long time. His lips moved, the way they always did when he was about to start a count.

Then he swallowed it.

He lay down. His eyes closed at once. His breathing went long and slow, and his thin hands lay open on the blanket.

Shi Feng sat down in the doorway with his back against the frame and his stitched side toward the wall.

He stayed a day and a night.

A pavilion maid brought rice at noon and again at dusk, taking the first bowl away cold. At midnight a guard saw who was sitting in the doorway and went the long way round.

Ji Yuanhe didn’t move once. He didn’t count once, either.

He woke in the grey before the second dawn.

Ji Yuanhe sat up slowly and looked at his hands. Then he looked over at the doorway, where Shi Feng was still sitting.

“I’m hungry,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shi Feng’s hand tightened on the door frame. It was the first sentence he’d ever heard from the old man without a number.

“There’s rice,” Shi Feng said. “It’s cold. I’ll have them heat it.”

“Don’t,” Ji Yuanhe said. He got up stiffly and walked past Shi Feng into the courtyard in his sleeping robe and bare feet. “Furnace first.”

The furnace hall was empty at that hour. Ji Yuanhe went straight to the smallest furnace, the one he’d used under guard during the Hunt, and laid out herbs. A simple Nascent Soul-grade pill, a 2 Mark recipe he’d made ten thousand times. His old hands moved quickly and surely.

Shi Feng stood in the doorway and watched.

Ji Yuanhe lit the fire. He fed the herbs in one by one, turned the flame down, waited, turned it up. His lips stayed shut. No “one,” no “two,” no count under his breath. Only the furnace’s soft roar and the old man’s steady breathing.

Two apprentices had come to the door behind Shi Feng, half asleep. They stopped when they saw who was working.

“Master Ji’s not counting,” the younger apprentice whispered.

“He always counts. He counts the stairs...” the older one whispered back.

“Shh!” the younger apprentice hissed.

The lid lifted. Two small clouds rose and hung under the hall’s roof. Ji Yuanhe took the pill out with bamboo tongs and held it to the lamp.

He looked at it for a long moment.

Then he laughed.

It wasn’t loud. It was thin and cracked, as if it hadn’t been used in years, which it hadn’t. But it went on until the old man had to put the tongs down and hold the bench. The two apprentices stared at each other. Nobody at the princess’s pavilion had ever heard Master Ji laugh.

“Two clouds,” Ji Yuanhe said, wiping his eyes. “Two! I used to do four in my sleep. I’ve forgotten how to keep the flame low.”

“You’ll remember,” Shi Feng said.

“An old horse knows the road,” Ji Yuanhe said. He looked at the pill again and laughed one more time, softly. “I didn’t count. Did you hear? I didn’t count once.”

“I heard,” Shi Feng said.

Shi Feng went to the basin to wash the night off his hands. Before he put them in the water, he took out the hairpin and held it out on his palm.

“Hold this for me, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said.

Ji Yuanhe took it in both hands and turned it in the lamplight. It was thin and plain, worn smooth where a hand had held it for years, with three small crescents cut into its head.

“Whose is it?” Ji Yuanhe asked.

Shi Feng washed his hands slowly. He rinsed them twice.

“It’s hers,” Shi Feng said. “That’s all I know.”

Ji Yuanhe didn’t ask who “hers” was. He held the pin a little more carefully, and said nothing until Shi Feng had dried his hands and turned around. Then he gave it back, the way a man gives back something that isn’t his to keep.

“After the bitter comes the sweet,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shi Feng put the pin inside his robe again.

“Eat your rice, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said. “Cold. Since you insist.”

That night Shi Feng sat alone on the roof of the west wing with a lamp, his private book, and the Void-Anchor Stone.

The stone sat in his left palm, cold and heavy. The air around his hand was still. The lamp flame beside it didn’t flicker, even when the wind came over the roof.

His side ached under the stitches where Helian Ba’s rift had found him, and the bruise from the monk’s bell had spread across his ribs in a dark purple band. Peak Deity Transformation, one realm under Helian Ba. At the Crater, the stone had stopped the axe and the Hunt’s law had stopped everything else. Under a tribulation there’d be no law. Just him and the sky.

“When you have a void of your own,” Shi Feng said to the stone.

He opened the book and wrote in short lines.

The Hunt, won for her. One million five hundred thousand. Ning Zhe, settled. The hairpin, back. The lotus, for Master Ji. Master Ji, cured.

He looked at the last line, then wrote one more under it.

Peak. Next: the void.

He closed the book. Far above Tianjing, the sky was clear and full of stars. Shi Feng looked at it for a long time, and for the first time, he felt the sky looking back at him.