Chapter 884 — A Small Sky

CHAPTER 884

A Small Sky

Shi Feng lifted the lid.

No steam came out. No light, either. The black bowl was quiet, and the Second Anvil Fire under it sank to a low red glow.

Three pills lay in the bottom of the bowl.

They were the size of longan seeds, pale and clear as rock crystal. At first glance, they looked like nothing much. Then the gallery saw what was inside them.

Inside each pill, small white clouds were moving. They drifted slowly through the clear body of the pill. There were nine of them in each pill. Shi Feng counted them twice.

Nine to a pill, three pills. Each one held a small sky.

Shi Feng’s shoulders dropped. Then he smiled.

“It worked, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said.

Ji Yuanhe sat down on his stool very suddenly.

The senior examiner came through the glass gate with his jade tray. His hands were shaking so badly that Si Jiahe had to steady the tray for him. He lifted the first pill in his tongs and held it up to the sun. The nine clouds inside it turned slowly in the light.

The hall saw it, and the hall lost its voice.

“…”

“There’s a sky in it.”

“A 6 Mark pill with a sky inside it.”

“Nine clouds in the pill instead of over it! Who’s ever made that?”

“Nobody! It’s happened twice in all the registers! Didn’t you hear the Tower Master?”

“And he’s mid Shattering Void. Mid Shattering Void!”

“A 6 Mark below Profound Heaven. There’s never been one. Not one living!”

Behind the glass, Xuanyuan Gui stood up.

He’d sat in the Imperial seat for three days and moved twice. Now he rose to his full height and looked at the pill in the examiner’s tongs. He didn’t speak.

Jiang Xu stood next. He closed his notary’s book over his one line and set it on his chair.

Old Tower Master Dai was already on his feet. He picked up his teacup, found it empty, and put it down again.

In the first ring, the 5 Marks of the capital rose together. There were twenty of them. They were the men and women who sat on the examiners’ bench and set the price of every pill in Tianjing, and none of them had stood for a candidate in their lives.

The old alchemist who’d spoken at the lighting rose with them. He was smiling, and there were tears in his beard.

“We came to watch him fail,” the old alchemist said. “All of us. I sat the 6 Mark once. My clouds greyed out, and I have read every furnace in this hall since, waiting to be wrong.”

Nobody told him to sit down. In the fourth ring a boy repeated the words to his father, and the row passed them along.

Then, from the top down, the Glass Hall bowed.

The three notaries behind the glass bowed first, slightly, as 6 Marks bow to one another. The 5 Marks in the first ring bowed lower. The examiners bowed behind them. Then the second ring, the third, the fourth, ring after ring up to the gamblers in the very top row, until a thousand people were bowing toward a black cauldron and a young man in burnt rags.

In the third ring, Jia Lianshou bowed with them. His face was grey, and he didn’t lift his head.

In the princess’s box, Long Caili stood, her pale veil hanging straight from brow to chin. A princess didn’t bow to a candidate. She inclined her head one inch, exactly one, and held it there.

Beside her, Shen Yaoqing bowed as a Serene Jade chief disciple bows to a 6 Mark. When she straightened, she didn’t look at the stand. She looked at her friend.

In the Azure Sun box, nobody bowed for a long moment.

Then Baili Xuan got up from his chair, holding his bound arm against his side, and bowed alone, stiffly and properly.

Qu Hanshan’s hand shook on the rail. He stood there a moment longer, and did not lower his head.

Qu Ming sat in his front-row seat, alone, staring at the pill.

On the stand, Shi Feng looked down at himself.

His sleeves were gone to the shoulder. Both forearms were blistered red from the 5 Mark’s third sky. His left palm was bound with a strip of cloth he’d torn off with his teeth. There was dried blood on his lip and under his eyes. His legs had started shaking, and he made them stop.

Three days. No sleep. Two Marks.

He turned to Ji Yuanhe, who was still sitting on his stool, staring at the pills.

“Master Ji,” Shi Feng said. “Is there any congee left?”

Ji Yuanhe blinked at him. Then the old man laughed, a thin, cracked laugh, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

“I kept the pot warm for three days,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“Then let’s go home,” Shi Feng said.

The hall was still bowing. Shi Feng had never liked being bowed to, so he bowed back, once, properly, to the notaries first. Then he picked up Mo’s cauldron and put it in his storage ring.

The board-caller climbed his stool for the last time and wrote two lines in large characters at the top of the board.

5 Mark: passed. 6 Mark: passed.

In the top ring, by the door, a man in grey sleeves straightened up before anyone else. He looked once at the three pills and once at Ji Yuanhe. Then he slipped out into the corridor, and nobody saw him go.