Chapter 896 — The Sixth Desk

CHAPTER 896

The Sixth Desk

The Records Hall opened at the first bell. Shi Feng was standing on its steps before the bell had finished ringing.

Inside, the long hall looked the way it had looked all year. Six desks stood in a row under the high windows, one for each Mark. Forty people already waited at the 3 Mark desk with tickets in their hands. At the far end of the hall the sixth desk sat in shadow, with an old keeper behind it.

Hua Yi saw him come in. She put down her jade ruler, stepped out from behind her desk and left her forty tickets standing.

Forty ticket-holders watched their keeper walk away from them, and none of them dared call her back.

“Ticket 3041, honoured guest,” Hua Yi said coolly. “Called in queue order.”

“Thank you, Keeper Hua,” Shi Feng said, bowing. “I’ve been waiting all year to hear that. A queue’s the only thing in this city nobody can cheat me in.”

“This way,” Hua Yi said.

She walked him past her own desk. She walked him past the fourth desk and the fifth, and the keepers there rose and bowed as he went by. The people in the 3 Mark queue turned to watch, and then they started whispering.

“Where’s she taking him?”

“That’s the sixth desk. It’s never open!”

“My master’s come here for thirty years. He’s never seen it call a ticket.”

“…”

The old keeper at the sixth desk was standing with his hands folded in his sleeves. He had probably been standing since the first bell.

Shi Feng had never seen him before. The clerk had said the keeper seldom left the tower’s archive, and there was still archive dust on his sleeves. The cloth over the chair had been smoothed flat, and the brass bell sat exactly on its corner.

“Keeper Lang Shouyi,” Hua Yi said. “Master Shi Feng. 6 Mark.”

“Master Shi,” Lang Shouyi said, and bowed low, lower than Pavilion courtesy asked of him. “Your ticket was drawn a year ago at the third desk. This old man apologises on behalf of the Hall for the wait of a year.”

“There’s nothing to apologise for, Keeper Lang,” Shi Feng said. “The Hall told me what grade I needed, and I went and got it. If you’d opened it early for a fee, I’d never have trusted another word written in here.”

Lang Shouyi’s old eyes creased a little.

“Heaven does not fail those who persevere,” Hua Yi said, and went back to her queue without another word.

Lang Shouyi took a slim case of dark wood from his drawer. A seal of white wax closed it, pressed with a jade lotus.

“The rule is that the seal is broken before the reader,” Lang Shouyi said. “Please watch.”

He broke it with his thumbnail. The wax cracked in the quiet. Inside lay a single slip of paper, folded once. He unfolded it, turned it so Shi Feng could read it, and read it aloud anyway in a slow, dry voice.

“Nangong Xiuyi,” Lang Shouyi read. “Of the Nangong house, Serene Jade Sect. Mortal; no realm. No likeness kept, by order.”

Shi Feng didn’t move.

Mortal. No realm. The woman who had brought him out of the Legendary Cultivator’s Ruin couldn’t cultivate at all. He had only ever heard her voice, and he had always assumed a voice that calm belonged to someone standing far above the clouds.

“Second line,” Lang Shouyi said. “One restoration pill drawn against this seal at the Wanhe tower, carried south to the frontier.”

There was a date written beside it.

Shi Feng knew that date. It was the month he had woken up in a frontier village with his body whole again, and nobody there could tell him who had carried him in.

So that’s where the pill came from, Shi Feng thought. She drew it against her own seal at a Pavilion tower and carried it south for a stranger.

His chest felt tight. He didn’t push it down.

“Third line,” Lang Shouyi said. “Enquiries in her name are heard only at the Lotus Gate of the Serene Jade Sect, from a reader of this desk.”

“And the fourth?” Shi Feng asked.

Lang Shouyi turned the slip over.

“The asker’s name is sent north,” Lang Shouyi said.

The hall had gone quiet around the sixth desk. Even the 3 Mark queue had stopped whispering.

“When?” Shi Feng asked.

“This morning, Master Shi,” Lang Shouyi said politely. “When your ticket was posted to this desk, the clause took effect. Your name left at dawn by the Pavilion’s own courier. The Hall regrets that it couldn’t wait for your consent. The seal doesn’t allow it.”

“So the north knows who asked before I’ve finished reading,” Shi Feng said.

“Someone in the north does,” Lang Shouyi said. “Whether she does, this old man couldn’t say.”

Shi Feng thought of Scholar Yang Yifu’s folder falling open a year ago, with the Serene Jade gatekeeper’s forms and the Hall’s forms stamped back and forth across each other. The gate sent every petitioner to the Hall. The Hall sent every petitioner back to the gate. He had called it a circle, and he had said somebody built it on purpose.

“It was a circle with one door,” Shi Feng said slowly. “The gate only hears a reader of this desk. And this desk only reads to a 6 Mark.”

“The mountain path turns, a village appears,” Lang Shouyi said. “The Serene Jade built it that way. A reader of this desk is the only one who can walk out of it.”

“How many have?” Shi Feng asked.

“In this old man’s time?” Lang Shouyi folded the slip back into its case. “You’re the first.”

Only a handful of living alchemists on the whole continent held the 6 Mark, and none of them had ever had a reason to ask. A frontier boy had needed two Marks at one sitting to find the way out.

Lang Shouyi set the case on the desk between them, open, with the broken lotus seal on top.

“The entry is yours to read as often as you like, Master Shi,” Lang Shouyi said. “It won’t say anything more.”

“It’s said enough,” Shi Feng said. He bowed properly, first to the slip and then to the old man. “Thank you for staying awake for it, Keeper Lang.”

Lang Shouyi bowed back.

Shi Feng walked out past five desks and forty staring people into the cold morning. Frost lay white on the steps. Somewhere on the north road, a Pavilion courier had been riding since dawn with his name in a sealed pouch.

His name had half a day’s start on him. He was going to have to catch up with it.