Chapter 917 — The Lightning Scar

CHAPTER 917

The Lightning Scar

Hulan Yuanlie sat on a bearskin in the middle of the furnace hall with his robe open to the waist, and the skin over his heart was grey.

The huge old man sat straight, his white beard reaching his belt. He hated this examination before the elders, but none would leave while his life was at stake.

“Well, alchemist?” Hulan Yuanlie said gruffly, glaring down at Shi Feng. “Look, then. Everyone else has.”

Shi Feng laid two fingers on the old man’s wrist and the flat of his other hand over the grey patch. He sent a thread of qi in through the wrist and followed it to the heart.

The lightning was still there.

Forty years after the tribulation, it still circled his heart in a tight, hot ring, and wherever it touched a meridian, it burned the meridian a little harder. The burned meridians hadn’t healed. They’d crystallised. Nine of the meridians around his heart were already stone, and the tenth had begun to go.

“How long?” Hulan Yuanlie asked, watching his face.

“Two years before the stone closes your heart,” Shi Feng said. “Maybe three. You already knew that.”

“Ha!” Hulan Yuanlie barked. “Finally, an alchemist who doesn’t stutter. Can you do it?”

“The stone has to break, and the lightning has to come out with it,” Shi Feng said. “A pill strong enough to break stone would break you with it, unless it carries the same lightning that’s in your heart. Then your heart will let it in.”

“That’s why the clan sent for those herbs,” Hulan Kui said softly from his seat by the wall.

“That’s why,” Shi Feng said, and stood up. “But there’s a problem with them.”

He laid the three herbs out on the stone table. Thunder-Split Pine Core. Nine-Bend Lightning Grass. Stone-Breaking Vine. Then he lit Mo’s cauldron, dropped the first two in, and the hall heard the problem for itself.

Crack!

The pine core and the lightning grass hit the heat, and blue sparks leapt between them and threw them to opposite sides of the cauldron. Each one had been struck by lightning while it grew. Each carried its own, and the two lightnings hated each other.

“They won’t mix!”

“Our own alchemists burned four sets of herbs that way!”

“We’re treating a dead horse as a living one.”

Shi Feng didn’t answer the elders. He folded the flame in the cauldron back on itself, once, and struck it with the second fold.

The Second Anvil Fire didn’t burn hotter. It burned heavier. The deep red flame came down on the two herbs in one heavy beat and held them in the same place, and the blue sparks between them flared and screamed. He struck again. And again. With every beat, the two lightnings were forced a little closer, until they had nowhere left to run and had to run into each other.

On the fortieth beat they joined.

The sparks stopped. One white thread of lightning circled the inside of the cauldron, smooth and steady.

The hall fell silent. Hulan Yuanlie watched the joined lightning, suddenly hopeful.

Shi Feng added the Stone-Breaking Vine. Then he opened his ring and took out a handful of his own herbs, a silver-green Snow Marrow Grass and two pieces of Cold Spring Jade, and dropped them in after the vine.

“Master Shi, those aren’t the clan’s herbs,” Hulan Kui said.

“No,” Shi Feng said, beating the fire. “Your list breaks the stone. It doesn’t cool the heart after the stone’s gone. Without these, he’d live through the pill and die of the fever. They’re two hundred and fifty thousand worth. The Hulan can consider them part of the fee.”

Hulan Kui’s mouth opened. Then the patriarch snorted, and Hulan Kui closed it.

At dusk, seven clouds stood over the black pines.

The whole fort came out to see them. Down in the logging town below the hill, people stood in the snowy street and pointed.

Shi Feng lifted the lid. The pill was pale blue, with a white thread of lightning turning slowly under its skin. He put it in Hulan Yuanlie’s palm.

The old man swallowed it without a word.

For ten breaths, nothing happened. Then Hulan Yuanlie’s whole body went rigid, and a sound of cracking stone came out of his chest. He bent forward and coughed, and grey dust came out of his mouth and fell on the bearskin. He coughed again, and again, and the grey patch over his heart cracked across and fell away in flakes, and under it was red, living skin.

He sat up, breathing. His breath was hot and deep.

“Patriarch!”

“His heart! I can feel his heart from here!”

“Forty years! Forty years, and it’s gone in one pill!”

“…”

Hulan Yuanlie put his hand on his chest and didn’t say anything at all for a long time. His eyes filled with tears. He left them unwiped, relieved he could finally breathe without pain.

Later, when the hall had emptied, Shi Feng found Chu Ze in the corridor outside the guest court, standing alone under a lamp.

“Three questions,” Shi Feng said. “Plainly.”

Chu Ze looked at him. Then he looked at Qin Wuyan behind him, and the smile slowly went away from his face.

“Ask,” Chu Ze said.

“Who paid the Hulan for the tea in Wanhe?” Shi Feng asked.

“A man in a grey sleeve,” Chu Ze said quietly. “He paid in stone notes from no house this one could name. He never gave a name of his own.”

“Has he paid again?” Shi Feng asked.

Chu Ze hesitated.

“This spring,” Chu Ze said. “For your route north. And your dates.”

Shi Feng was quiet for a moment.

“Then here’s the third question,” Shi Feng said. “Who in this fort knew which court I’d be sleeping in tonight?”

Chu Ze opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Over the guest court wall, one by one, the lamps began to go out.