Chapter 875 — Hour Six

CHAPTER 875

Hour Six

For the first hour, nothing rose.

Shi Feng fed the herbs in one at a time. He didn’t wait for each to melt before the next. Star-Swallow Ginseng, thunder orchid, Heaven-Ladder Vine, the Purple Heaven Heart Root. Each one went into the dark red fire and vanished without a sound, and he moved on.

The gallery waited for steam. None came. Mo’s cauldron sat on its bed and hummed, low and even, and the glass roof above it stayed as clear as a winter sky.

“He’s put everything in at once!”

“That’s how you make soup, not a 5 Mark pill!”

In the first ring, the old alchemist who’d spoken at the lighting shook his head slowly.

“He sorted last night,” the old alchemist said. “Look at the fire. It’s not melting them. It’s taking them apart.”

“Sit down, old brother,” the man beside him said. “The board decides, not the first ring.”

“I sat the 6 Mark once,” the old alchemist said. “I watched my own clouds grey out. I know what a dying pill looks like, and that is not one.”

The man beside him laughed, and the laugh went along the row. Nobody asked the old alchemist anything else that morning.

Inside the cauldron, each herb’s pattern rose out of its body and hung in the heat. Shi Feng could feel them through the bronze, eleven sets of strings tangled together. He’d tuned every one of them on the practice tray. Now he only had to tune them to each other, in the fire, without seeing them.

He kept his palm on the lid and his eyes half shut, and he listened.

“Two hundred,” Ji Yuanhe said softly from his stool. “Two hundred and one.”

The old man wasn’t counting the herbs now. He was counting the cauldron’s hum, one number to each low note, the way he’d counted in the Pit. Except now his voice was easy, and he smiled a little between numbers.

By the third hour, the first ring had stopped leaning forward.

By the fourth hour, the vendors in the outer corridor were selling more tea than seats.

By the fifth hour, the gallery had begun to argue among itself.

“Is the fire even on? The glass isn’t fogged.”

“It’s on. Look at the bed. That red is darker than blood.”

“Maybe the princess’s herbs are no good.”

“The princess’s herbs came out of the Inner Treasury. If they’re no good, nothing in Tianjing is!”

“Then it’s the hands that are no good.”

At the sixth hour, an old man in a sect robe stood up in the fourth ring and stretched.

“There’s nothing to see,” the old man said loudly. “A pill this size shows clouds by the third hour or it doesn’t show them at all. I’ll come back tomorrow and read the result off the board.”

Half the fourth ring stood up with him. Then half the third. They filed out past the vendors, talking loudly about lunch. The hall emptied by a third in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea.

Shi Feng heard them leave. He didn’t look up.

Too early, Shi Feng thought. The eleven essences were still resisting each other. Six hours had only brought them close enough to combine. If he forced the pill up now, it would rise as a 5 Mark pill of eight clouds, and Qu Hanshan had already made that one.

“Hastiness brings no success,” Ji Yuanhe murmured, as if he’d heard the thought.

In the Azure Sun box, Qu Ming stretched out his legs on the rail.

“Waiter!” Qu Ming called, loud enough for the whole hall. “Lunch! Braised duck, the crisp kind. Two jugs of plum wine. And a bowl of white rice for the candidate. He’ll want something to remember the day by!”

The sect sons in the box behind him laughed. Baili Xuan didn’t.

The vendor came running with a tray. Qu Ming ate his duck with his feet on the rail and his eyes on the stand, and made a show of every bite.

Qu Hanshan sat beside his grandson without touching any of it. His tea had gone cold in his hand. He was watching the dark red fire under Mo’s cauldron, and he wasn’t smiling.

In the princess’s box, Long Caili hadn’t moved since the lighting. She hadn’t touched the tea her maid had poured, either. Shen Yaoqing glanced at her once, then back at the stand.

“He isn’t nervous,” Shen Yaoqing said quietly.

“No,” Long Caili said.

“Are you?” Shen Yaoqing asked.

“I knew what I was risking,” Long Caili said. “That hasn’t changed because other people are laughing.”

Shen Yaoqing looked at her friend’s cold tea and didn’t say anything.

Behind the glass, Old Tower Master Dai refilled his cup. Jiang Xu held a page of his notary’s book between two fingers, waiting for something worth recording. Xuanyuan Gui sat exactly as he had at dawn, with his hands on his knees, and his eyes stayed on the cauldron.

Shi Feng shifted his palm on the lid by a finger’s width.

Under the bronze, the eleven hums had become nine. Then seven. Then, slowly, as the afternoon light crossed the glass roof, they began to settle into one.

“Nine hundred,” Ji Yuanhe said, and the old man’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Master Shi. It’s getting heavy.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “Let it. We’re not done yet.”

Outside, the sun went down over Tianjing. Inside the glass, the cauldron’s single hum deepened until the stand began to shake.