Chapter 878 — No Cooling

CHAPTER 878

No Cooling

“Second crate, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said.

Ji Yuanhe was already on his feet. He broke the seal on the crate of 6 Mark herbs and lifted out the first one in both hands. It was a pale blue root as long as a forearm, and the frost on it didn’t melt even this close to the stand.

“Frost-Heaven Root, eight hundred years,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Good.”

The gallery had been on its feet shouting about three skies. Now it went quiet in waves, from the first ring up to the last.

“Wait. What’s he doing?”

“The 6 Mark herbs? Now?”

“The cauldron’s still black from the tribulation!”

“He hasn’t even cooled it!”

Mo’s cauldron sat on its bed with its bronze still smoking. The inside of the bowl was scorched dark from three skies of fire, and the air above it still bent with heat. Every alchemist in the hall knew what that meant. After a tribulation, you let the furnace cool for a day, scrubbed the bowl, and lit it again clean. Anything else was asking for the residue to poison the next batch.

Shi Feng dropped the Frost-Heaven Root into it.

It hissed once, and was gone.

In the third ring of the gallery, a tall, heavy man in a purple robe with the 5 Mark badge on his chest stood up. He had a square grey beard and a voice that carried without effort. Jia Lianshou had led the petition of twelve against this sitting. He’d been sitting very quietly since the third sky.

“Tower Master!” Jia Lianshou called down through the glass. “I object!”

The hall turned to look at him.

“The furnace is unclean,” Jia Lianshou said loudly. “It’s full of tribulation residue. Any alchemist knows a fouled furnace ruins its next pill. If the candidate fails, he’ll say the 5 Mark pill fouled his furnace and the sitting was unfair. I ask that the sitting be paused, the cauldron be cooled and cleaned, and the candidate start the 6 Mark fresh, as the craft requires.”

Several of the petition’s signers nodded around him.

“That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“Cooling’s the rule of the craft.”

“Hold on. If the furnace goes out, the sitting ends. Wasn’t that in the rules?”

The gallery went quiet again, as people worked it out.

Si Jiahe had read the rule aloud at dawn on the first day. If the furnace goes out, the sitting ends. A cooled cauldron was a cauldron that had gone out. Jia Lianshou wasn’t asking for a pause. He was asking for the sitting to end, and making it sound like a favour.

“Sweet words are poison,” someone muttered in the second ring.

Shi Feng dropped the second 6 Mark herb into the cauldron and turned his head toward the gallery.

“Thank you for worrying about my furnace, Master Jia,” Shi Feng said. “But it’s not fouled. It’s open.”

“Open?” Jia Lianshou said coldly.

“The 6 Mark herbs won’t break open in ordinary fire. Not this grade,” Shi Feng said. “Their patterns are locked too tight. You can soften them for a month, or you can put them in a bowl that heaven has just struck three times. I don’t have a month. I have this bowl.”

He dropped in the third herb. It melted at once, and a smell like clean snow filled the stand.

“If I cool it, I lose the fire that opens them, and I lose the sitting,” Shi Feng said. “So I’ll keep it hot. I’ll take the risk myself.”

Jia Lianshou’s face went red.

“That’s not how the craft is done!” Jia Lianshou snapped. “Tower Master! The petition was entered in the register. Surely the Pavilion won’t let a candidate break a thousand years of practice in front of three notaries!”

Old Tower Master Dai had been drinking his tea through all of it. He finished the cup, set it down on its tray, and dabbed his lips with a cloth.

“Master Jia,” Old Tower Master Dai said politely. “I’m sorry. I did hear you. The rule of the Pavilion is that a candidate sits with his own furnace, his own fire and his own ingredients. How he keeps them is the candidate’s affair. It’s not mine. It’s not the register’s. It certainly isn’t the gallery’s.”

He poured himself another cup.

“If the pill dies, it dies under his name,” Old Tower Master Dai said. “That’s his risk. Please sit down. You’re blocking the people behind you.”

The people behind Jia Lianshou had, in fact, been leaning to see round him. Someone laughed.

Jia Lianshou sat down slowly. His face was purple.

“…”

Jiang Xu wrote the objection in his notary’s book, word for word, and closed the page on it.

In the princess’s box, Long Caili hadn’t turned her veiled head through any of it.

“He gave his reason in front of the whole hall,” Shen Yaoqing said quietly. “If it fails now, there’s no excuse left.”

“He doesn’t want an excuse,” Long Caili said.

“How do you know that?” Shen Yaoqing asked.

“Because he didn’t ask me for one,” Long Caili said, and said nothing more.

Shi Feng went on feeding in the 6 Mark herbs. Thunder-Bone Moss. Cloud-Sea Pearl Grass. The three Inner Treasury herbs last, one by one, each so heavy that Ji Yuanhe’s thin arms trembled when he handed it up. Each one hissed into the black bowl and vanished.

“Strike the iron while it’s hot,” the old alchemist in the first ring murmured.

Inside the cauldron, the patterns came up out of their herbs faster than the 5 Mark’s had, and wilder. They were thicker, too, like ropes instead of strings. And the residue of three skies was still in the bronze, clinging to every one of them.

Behind the glass, on the right of the dais, Xuanyuan Gui moved for the first time since dawn on the first day.

He took his hands off his knees and leaned forward, very slightly, toward the stand.

Every 5 Mark in the gallery saw it. Nobody breathed.

Old Tower Master Dai’s teacup stopped halfway to his lips.