Chapter 907 — Thirteenth

CHAPTER 907

Thirteenth

The thread wouldn’t hold.

Lao Qi sewed the cut three times with the caravan’s best silk thread, and three times the cold in the flesh pushed the stitches apart. By the third try his hands were shaking and the needle had frost on it.

“It’s cursed,” Lao Qi said miserably. “Boss, the cut’s cursed.”

“It’s not cursed,” Shi Feng said. “It’s cold. Put the needle away before you lose a finger.”

He took a pill out of his ring. It was black and cracked down one side, and it smelled of scorched pine. Hao Dafu leaned over to look and pulled back.

“That one’s burnt,” Hao Dafu said. “Young man, even I can see that one’s burnt.”

“It’s a waste pill,” Shi Feng agreed. “Blazing Marrow, from a batch that went wrong.”

“Then you can’t eat it!” Hao Dafu said.

Shi Feng ate it.

Anyone else’s body would have thrown a waste pill straight back up like poison. His All-Devouring Physique took the whole pill down and broke it open, and all the fire of the herbs inside poured into him at once. The pill was worthless to anyone else. It was still worth every herb that had gone into it. The fire went straight to the wound. The cold met it under his ribs, and for the rest of the night the two of them fought it out inside him.

He lay on a salt sack by the cook fire and burned.

The fever came at midnight. Sweat ran off him and steamed in the mountain air, and twice he heard Hao Dafu telling the drivers to keep their voices down. They didn’t. They sat around the fire with their bowls and told the fight over again, and every time they told it, it got bigger. Shi Feng listened with his eyes shut and let them. By morning the story would be halfway to Hanli. He’d rather be a tall tale than a name on a list.

“He cut the mountain open,” Lao Qi said. “I saw it. A crack in the sky!”

“That was the other one’s crack,” the young guard said.

“Then he cut the crack!” Lao Qi said.

“He walked on air,” another driver said. “Three paces up. No, five.”

“He forged a sword with his bare hand in the middle of the fight,” Hao Dafu said importantly. “I was standing right beside him with my ladle. I gave him advice.”

“You told him the wrong left, boss,” a driver said.

“I told him the right left! He just didn’t take it!” Hao Dafu said.

Near dawn the cold broke. Shi Feng opened his eyes and found the wound closed under his hand, a long pink line across his ribs. His qi was still thin. It would take a few days of quiet breathing to fill again.

He sat up. Every driver around the fire stopped talking.

“Is there any congee?” Shi Feng asked.

Lao Qi nearly knocked the pot over getting him a bowl.

A fight at Grey Goose Pass was the best story the north road had heard in years, and it travelled faster than the salt.

Two days later, a tea merchant coming south met the salt train on the switchbacks and already knew a version of it. A pair of monks coming north passed them at a spring and asked if it was true the young man had eaten a burnt pill and lived. At the last waystation before the plain, the stable boy refused Hao Dafu’s copper for the mules’ feed and asked to shake the young man’s hand instead.

Shi Feng shook it and paid for the feed anyway.

Hanli Town sat where the pass opened onto the northern plain, a walled market town of grey stone with an inn on every corner. Hao Dafu’s train rolled in on the fifth day, and the first thing Shi Feng saw at the inn was a crowd around the noticeboard.

The new Tianji issue had come up the post road that morning. A scholar in a patched blue robe stood on a bench in front of it, reading it to the room in a loud, offended voice.

“Thirteenth, Linghu Yan,” the scholar read. “No! Fourteenth, Linghu Yan. Thirteenth…” He squinted. “Thirteenth, Shi Feng.”

The room murmured.

“Shi Feng? The one from the capital contest?”

“The one at the Grey Goose fight? They say he was only mid Shattering Void!”

“It’s a misprint,” the scholar declared, and slapped the notice. “It’s clearly a misprint. Seeing is believing, and hearing is only wind. Linghu Yan is late Shattering Void and fourteenth on the list. Nobody at mid Shattering Void beats the fourteenth. It doesn’t happen. The Tianji Mansion has made a mistake, and somebody should write to them about it.”

Shi Feng sat down at the corner table with Hao Dafu. Hao Dafu opened his mouth.

Shi Feng put a finger on the table, and Hao Dafu closed it again.

“You’re right, sir,” Shi Feng said warmly to the scholar. “Mid Shattering Void against late, and the late one a genius? It would take a miracle, or a very lucky ambush in the dark. I’d write to them too.”

The scholar looked delighted.

“You see? This young man understands cultivation!” the scholar said. “Innkeeper! His tea is on me!”

“Thank you, sir,” Shi Feng said. “Could I have more rice as well?”

The innkeeper brought the rice. Hao Dafu stared at Shi Feng across the table, then at the scholar, then at the noticeboard, and his face went through several colours.

“Eat,” Shi Feng told him quietly. “If they believe it’s a misprint, nobody comes to this inn looking for the man in it. That’s worth more than the rank.”

“You’re thirteenth on the list,” Hao Dafu whispered. “Thirteenth. And you’re going to let them call it a misprint?”

“I’m going to let them call it anything they like,” Shi Feng said. “The list will still be there tomorrow.”

Hao Dafu ate.

Shi Feng ate too, and looked at the notice from across the room. Thirteenth. Ten days ago, at the north gate, it had been twentieth. He found he didn’t much care about the number. What he cared about was the line under his own, where Linghu Yan’s name sat now.

Linghu Yan had been seen at Grey Goose Pass with his face bare.

Somewhere far to the south, someone else was reading the same issue.