Chapter 876 — Six, Seven, Eight

CHAPTER 876

Six, Seven, Eight

The first cloud rose at midnight.

It came out of the cauldron’s lid as a thin white thread. It curled once under the glass roof and spread into a flat cloud the size of a table. The lamps turned it silver.

The board-caller had been asleep on his stool. A clerk kicked the stool, and he jumped up and grabbed his brush.

“One cloud!” the board-caller announced.

Barely two hundred people were left in the hall. Every one of them sat up.

“Finally!”

“One cloud after eighteen hours? That’s a joke.”

“Wait. Listen to the furnace.”

The cauldron’s hum hadn’t risen with the cloud. It had gone deeper. The stand shook under Shi Feng’s boots, and the glass wall gave a faint ring each time the bronze sang.

Shi Feng kept his palm on the lid. Under it, eleven patterns had become one, and the one was heavy. It wanted to rise. He let it up by a finger’s width, then pressed the lid shut again. A cloud torn loose now would take the pill with it.

Good, Shi Feng thought. It’s ready to move. Now it has to move slowly.

“Two clouds!”

“Three!”

By the second watch, a runner had gone out to the teahouses. By the third, the outer corridor was full of people pushing to get back in. Gamblers, sect juniors, servants sent by their masters, and alchemists in their sleeping robes came through the doors and took their old seats as fast as they could climb.

“Four clouds! Five!”

At dawn on the second day, the hall was fuller than it had been at the lighting. Many of the people who’d left at the sixth hour stood in the aisles now, red-faced, pretending they’d never gone.

The sixth cloud took its time. It formed, thinned, and formed again.

“Six clouds!” the board-caller shouted. “The 5 Mark line is reached!”

The gallery broke into noise.

“He passes! The bumpkin passes the 5 Mark!”

“Twenty-three years old! A 4 Mark for one year!”

“Six is a pass. Fine. But most of the 5 Marks on the register stopped at six.”

Shi Feng didn’t stop. He turned the lid a quarter turn on the next low note and let the pill climb again.

“Seven clouds!”

In the first ring, the old alchemist who’d spoken at the lighting set his hands flat on his knees.

“The chessboard changes with one move,” the old alchemist said quietly.

Ji Yuanhe was counting under his breath beside the stand. His voice was steady, and Shi Feng could hear the smile in it between numbers. The old man had stopped counting the cauldron’s hum. He was counting the clouds now, slowly, like a man counting coins.

The eighth cloud came at mid-morning.

It formed cleanly, all at once. A thick white cloud sat above the other seven, and the board-caller had to stand on his stool to reach the top of the board.

“Eight clouds!” the board-caller called. “Perfect!”

The hall went quiet. Half the gallery turned to look at the Azure Sun box at the same time.

Eight clouds was Qu Hanshan’s registered number. He’d reached it at the Void-Mending Pill in front of half this hall, with eight disciples feeding his flame. It was the number he’d spent his whole life climbing to, and it was why the capital called him half-step 6 Mark.

Qu Hanshan had just lifted his teacup. His hand stopped halfway to his mouth and stayed there.

“Eight. The same as Old Master Qu.”

“Alone. Without a single disciple feeding the fire!”

“And he’s mid Shattering Void! How old was Old Master Qu when he first made eight?”

“Over a hundred.”

“…”

Qu Ming’s feet came down off the rail with a thump.

“So he made eight. So what?” Qu Ming said loudly. “Eight’s a pass at the 5 Mark. It’s nothing at the 6!”

Nobody in the gallery agreed with him out loud. Several people moved a little further from the Azure Sun box.

In the princess’s box, Shen Yaoqing looked at Qu Hanshan’s frozen teacup, then at Long Caili.

“Eight clouds, Highness,” Shen Yaoqing said. “The same number Qu Hanshan made when he failed my master.”

“I didn’t pay for eight,” Long Caili said coldly behind her veil. “I paid for the 6 Mark.”

Under the lid, the pill pushed against Shi Feng’s palm. It was heavier than anything he’d held in a furnace before. It wanted a ninth cloud, and if he gave it one, the sky would answer.

He’d known that since he wrote two lines in the register. A 5 Mark pill at eight clouds was what Qu Hanshan made. Shi Feng hadn’t come here to sit Qu Hanshan’s sitting.

He let the lid rise under his palm.

The ninth cloud opened over the glass roof. The board-caller lifted his brush and forgot to write.

Then the nine clouds began to darken.

They went grey at the edges, then grey all through, then black. The light in the hall turned the colour of a storm. The glass roof creaked under a weight nobody could see.

“It’s calling the sky!”

“A pill tribulation at a 5 Mark sitting! The array, is the array lit?”

The sitting array blazed up along the floor inside the glass wall, a ring of pale lines round the stand.

Qu Hanshan finally put down his teacup. It rattled on the rail.

Shi Feng took his palm off the lid and rolled up his sleeves.