Chapter 849 — The Sealed Furnace

CHAPTER 849

The Sealed Furnace

The sealed vault room lay three floors under the Phoenix Tail Pavilion, behind two iron doors and a ward that hummed in the stone.

It was a plain square room, twenty-four paces across. There were no windows. The walls were grey granite, with gold ward lines cut deep into the granite. In the middle of the floor stood Mo’s cauldron on its three bronze legs, black with old soot.

Shi Feng knelt beside it, laying out herbs on a cloth with his good hand.

There were forty-one of them, in nine groups. Grey Hollow Root, cut into coins. Starfold Moss, still damp. Three pale Rift Lilies from the Orchard, each worth more than a city house. He set every one of them out in the order they would go into the fire, and checked the order twice.

Ji Yuanhe sat against the far wall with a cushion and a cup of water. He watched the herbs and said nothing.

Behind them, the outer iron door opened and closed. Footsteps came down the last stair.

Shen Yaoqing stopped in the doorway. She wore white, with a jade lotus pinned at her collar and a plain sword at her hip. The princess’s two guards who’d been standing at the door came down the stair behind her, looking uncertain.

“You may go,” Shen Yaoqing told them. “I’ll stand here.”

The guards looked at Shi Feng.

“Her Highness’s guards are good,” Shi Feng said mildly. “They’re both Shattering Void.”

“So am I,” Shen Yaoqing said. “And it’s my master’s pill.”

The guards bowed and went back up the stair. Shen Yaoqing stepped into the doorway and stood there with her back to the iron, facing the room.

“You don’t trust the princess’s guards?” Shi Feng asked.

“If you doubt a man, don’t use him. If you use him, don’t doubt him,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly. “I’ve decided to use you. I don’t doubt you. I doubt the walls.”

Shi Feng nodded and went back to his herbs. She was afraid for her master. If standing guard helped her wait, he wasn’t going to argue.

Shen Yaoqing watched him lay out the last group. It took a long time. He turned each root to face the same way and moved one lily a finger’s width to the left.

“Elder Ye has three days,” Shen Yaoqing said. “You’re arranging flowers.”

“The order is the pill,” Shi Feng said, without looking up. “It has to go into the fire in exactly this order. If I get one herb wrong halfway through, I can’t reach across and fix it. I’ll be holding the fire with both hands.”

Shen Yaoqing didn’t answer. She also didn’t say anything else about flowers.

After a while, she spoke again.

“The princess says you folded a teacup this morning,” Shen Yaoqing said, watching his injured hand.

“A hand’s width,” Shi Feng said.

“And the pill?” Shen Yaoqing asked. She glanced from his bandage to the cauldron.

“It needs a fold the size of the cauldron,” Shi Feng said plainly. “I’ve never made one that big. I’ll find out tonight whether I can.”

“And if you can’t?” Shen Yaoqing asked, refusing to let the risk pass unspoken.

“Then the pill tears itself apart in the middle of its own tribulation,” Shi Feng said. “I lose six hundred and fifty thousand in herbs, and you’ll have to go and find a 6 Mark after all.”

Shen Yaoqing looked at him for a long moment. Her face didn’t change.

“Begin,” Shen Yaoqing said.

Shi Feng put his right palm flat on the cauldron’s bronze.

The Thousand Forge Flame came out of his hand and into the metal, and the cauldron’s belly went from black to dull red in three breaths. Then he struck the Second Anvil Fire inside it.

At Entry, on a frozen lane before his 4 Mark sitting, the anvil beats had stuttered, and one beat in three had come out wrong. Since the Hunt, the art had reached Major Success, and he no longer had to stop and correct a failed beat. Two rhythms ran inside the bronze together, the steady flame underneath and the anvil beats striking on top of it, and neither one disturbed the other.

The first group went in. Grey Hollow Root, nine coins of it. The cauldron hissed.

“One,” Ji Yuanhe said quietly from the wall. He wasn’t counting out of fear tonight. He was counting beats, the way he’d been taught to at a furnace.

Shi Feng fed the second group on the old man’s count, then the third. The room grew hot. Sweat ran down his face and into the bandage on his left arm, and his strapped ribs ached every time he leaned over the cauldron. He didn’t slow down.

By the sixth group, the first white mist rose from the cauldron’s lid and gathered under the stone ceiling.

“One cloud,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shen Yaoqing lifted her eyes to the ceiling.

The Rift Lilies went in with the eighth group. The moment they touched the fire, the air above the cauldron flickered. For half a breath, a thin black line appeared over the lid, a hand long, and then closed again.

“That’s the pill,” Shi Feng said, before Shen Yaoqing could ask. “It’s the Void-Mending Pill, and void herbs don’t like to stay in one place. It’ll try that again later, harder.”

The ninth group went in. Shi Feng closed the lid and put both hands on the bronze, the burned one too.

The clouds rose.

“Three,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Four. Five.”

The white mist thickened under the ceiling. Each new cloud was heavier than the last.

“Seven,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shen Yaoqing’s hand had moved to the hilt of her sword. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Nine,” Ji Yuanhe said. Then, more quietly: “Master Shi.”

The nine white clouds under the ceiling stopped rising. They pressed together. Their edges turned grey, then dark grey, and then all nine went black at once, and a low rumble ran through the granite walls.

[Burned: Orchard herbs, about 650,000 | Left: about 1,750,000 in herbs]

The cauldron lid shook under his palms. A black line opened in the bronze itself, right across the lid, and something inside began to push its way out through it.