Chapter 927 — Alive

CHAPTER 927

Alive

Gou Ran’s storage ring was plain iron, and its seal broke when its owner died.

Shi Feng opened it that evening by the caravan’s fire on the far side of the saddle, with his left shoulder packed in hot herbs and bound to his chest. Lü Wancheng sat across from him and pretended not to watch.

There wasn’t much inside. A few thousand in silver. Six spare bone stakes. A jar of grey powder that smelled of graves. A Deity Transformation-grade disguise talisman, cracked in half, which explained the aura Gou Ran had shown at the fort and on the road.

At the bottom lay a slip of yellow paper, folded once.

It had no seal, no crest and no signature. There were four words on it in a clerk’s square hand.

Alchemist, 6 Mark. Alive.

Shi Feng read it and sat still for a while.

At Black Pine Fort he’d thought the grey sleeves had come for him because he’d escaped them. He’d broken their Pill Pit and carried Ji Yuanhe out of it, and he’d expected them to want him dead for that. A slip that said dead would have been simple.

This one said alive. Gou Ran had told him so on the road. We were told to bring you in whole. Before the mist he’d said it again. I was told not to damage your hands.

They didn’t want revenge. They wanted a 6 Mark alchemist chained to a black iron furnace, refining for them until he died, the way Ji Yuanhe had been chained in the Pit. Shi Feng felt disgusted. They still meant to turn people into tools. His new Mark had only made them more determined to capture him.

He held the slip over the fire. It caught at the corner and burned down to his fingers, and he dropped the last of it into the coals.

“Bad news, Elder Shi?” Lü Wancheng asked, and leaned forward.

“Orders to capture me alive,” Shi Feng said. “That’s all you need to know, Steward Lü.”

Lü Wancheng shuddered and didn’t ask anything more.

Qin Wuyan sat on a herb crate at the edge of the firelight. He had watched the slip burn. He didn’t say anything about it either, but that night he sat outside Shi Feng’s wagon until dawn instead of going to his blanket.

The caravan came down off the pass in three days, and the story of the saddle came down with it.

By the first night’s fire, there had been five bandits on Snow Wolf Pass. By the second night there were eleven, and the avalanche had been the size of a mountain, and Senior Qin had held it up with one finger. By the third night, the drivers were arguing about whether there had been twenty bandits or thirty, and whether Elder Shi had melted half the saddle or all of it.

“All of it,” a driver said. “I was standing in it. Up to my waist.”

“Your knees,” another driver said. “I saw you. It was your knees.”

“It felt like my waist!” the first driver said. “You weren’t in it, so you don’t know!”

“Cut the grass and leave the roots, and the spring wind brings it back,” an old cook said, stirring the pot. “Those bandits won’t be the last.”

Nobody argued with that, and the fire went quiet for a while.

On the last morning, at the foot of the pass, Lü Wancheng came to find him with a ledger under his arm and a stubborn look on his round face.

“Elder Shi, this one refuses,” Lü Wancheng said at once, before Shi Feng had said anything. “Your passage money. You paid it to my clerk at the camp. Here it is back.”

He held out a purse.

“I rode with your caravan,” Shi Feng said. “Passengers pay.”

“Passengers don’t hold the saddle!” Lü Wancheng said, and put the purse into Shi Feng’s hand himself. “And that’s not all. The Pavilion pays a road bounty on bandits killed defending its caravans. Twenty thousand a head at Shattering Void. Three heads. This one has written sixty thousand to your name in the caravan’s book, and the Frost Pass tower will honour it.”

He showed the page. It was written in very neat characters, already dried.

“Thank you, Steward Lü,” Shi Feng said.

Lü Wancheng beamed, bowed and hurried off to shout at the drivers about the harnesses.

Shi Feng found the caravan’s younger herb clerk by the last wagon, counting sacks. The boy straightened up so fast he dropped his brush.

“The caravan keeps a widows’ box,” Shi Feng said. “For guards who died on the road in other years.”

“Yes, Elder Shi,” the clerk said nervously. “Eleven families. The steward puts a little in every trip.”

“Move the sixty thousand from my name into the box,” Shi Feng said. “Write it as a donation from the Pavilion. And don’t tell the steward until you’ve crossed back over the pass.”

“Why not, Elder Shi?” the clerk asked.

“Because he’ll try to give it back to me, and I’ll have to refuse it again,” Shi Feng said. “We’ll be here all day.”

The young herb clerk laughed, then looked nervously at Shi Feng. When Shi Feng didn’t object, he relaxed and wrote down the donation.

Below the foot of the pass the road ran north into a long white valley. Halfway down it, Shi Feng could see a line of pale stones standing in the snow, one every hundred paces, as far as the valley went.

Past them, the snow stopped.