Chapter 931 — Eight Clouds at Lianxia

CHAPTER 931

Eight Clouds at Lianxia

The Zhongli herbs came the next morning in nine lacquered boxes, carried by eighteen servants, and the whole street followed them to the branch.

Shi Feng set Mo’s cauldron on four stones in the cleared yard. The three-legged black bronze was scarred, its lid pierced with nine holes.

Zhongli Jue stood beside it with his stiff leg planted in the snow. He’d come before dawn and hadn’t sat down since.

“You can stand closer,” Shi Feng said, and opened the first box. “You won’t see anything from there.”

Zhongli Jue took two steps closer. Behind him, people were already crowding the yard gate and climbing the back wall. Kang Yi clasped his hands at the counting-room door, afraid something might go wrong.

Shi Feng laid the nine boxes open on the stones.

The Inner Sky Pill needed nine herbs. Seven of them were Shattering Void-grade, and two were Profound Heaven-grade: a white root as long as his forearm that had grown in a cave above the cloud line, and a single blue flower sealed in ice that must have cost the Zhongli more than the whole fee. Forty years of gathering lay on the stones in the snow.

“Watch my hands,” Shi Feng said, and lit the furnace. “Not the fire.”

He started with the seven lesser herbs. The Thousand Forge Flame Art went into the furnace as a steady red heat, and he dropped them in one after another, each at its own moment. The root bark went in first and cracked. The sap went in after it and boiled. He moved his right hand in a slow circle above the lid, and the steam coming out of the nine holes turned in the same circle.

“Why that order?” Zhongli Jue asked quietly.

“The bark has to open before the sap goes in,” Shi Feng said, without stopping. “If it doesn’t, the sap boils outside it and burns.”

Zhongli Jue nodded and said nothing more. He was watching every pass of Shi Feng’s hand.

The two Profound Heaven herbs went in at the second hour. The white root fought the fire, and the furnace shook on its stones. Shi Feng struck the Second Anvil Fire inside the flame, nine beats and a rest, and the beats drove the root’s qi down into the others until the shaking stopped. Then he broke the ice off the blue flower with his fingers and dropped it in whole.

The furnace went quiet.

Shi Feng felt it through the bronze. Inside, the nine herbs had melted together into one bead of light, and the bead was trying to open.

It wasn’t cracking. It was opening from the inside. For one breath he felt a small, empty space form in the middle of the pill, a space that wasn’t in the furnace at all. It had its own up and down. It had a sky.

Then the pill sealed over it, and the space closed.

Shi Feng finished the last pass, keeping his excitement from disturbing the pill. For one breath it had tried to open a heaven of its own. A Profound Heaven cultivator did that inside himself.

Now he knew the shape of it.

He lifted the lid.

The steam went straight up out of the nine holes and didn’t come down. It climbed above the yard, above the roofs of Lianxia, and spread out into a white cloud over the town. A second cloud formed beside it, and a third. The crowd on the wall started counting out loud.

“Four! Five!”

“Six! There’s a sixth!”

“Seven!”

They waited. The street below had gone completely silent.

“Eight!”

Eight white clouds stood in a ring over Lianxia in the noon sky. The pill in the bottom of the furnace was the size of a longan, milk-white, with a faint line around it where it had sealed. It was Perfect.

“Eight clouds! Eight! That’s Perfect!”

“Over Lianxia? I’ve lived here sixty years, and I’ve never seen more than five!”

“Look! Look up the mountain!”

On the lower slopes above the town, white figures were coming down the stair. Five of them, then seven. Serene Jade outer elders, in plain white robes with jade lotuses at their belts, had stopped halfway down and stood looking at the clouds.

“The elders came down to look,” someone whispered. “The sect’s elders came down to look at a pill.”

“A real dragon among men,” an old carter said, and took off his hat.

“…”

Shi Feng took the pill out with a jade spoon and laid it in a box. He held the box out to Zhongli Jue.

Zhongli Jue didn’t take it at once. He looked at the pill, then at Shi Feng’s hands, then at the furnace.

“Every pass,” Zhongli Jue said hoarsely. “I watched every pass.” He took the box with both hands and bowed so low that his stiff leg shook. “The Zhongli thank Elder Shi. My grandfather will begin his attempt as soon as I bring it home.”

“Tell him to take it on an empty stomach,” Shi Feng said. “He should choose a place that can withstand the attempt.”

The Zhongli steward paid in the counting room that afternoon, one and a half million in Pavilion notes. Shi Feng counted out one hundred and fifty thousand from the top and pushed it across the desk to Kang Yi.

“Elder Shi!” Kang Yi said, and tried to push it back. “Her Highness set that cut. But she won’t know if you don’t pay it. This humble one won’t say a word…”

“It’s her business,” Shi Feng said. “I signed at her counter. Write it in the ledger.”

Kang Yi wrote it in the ledger with shaking hands.

That night, Shi Feng opened his private book and wrote under the line about the north.

Inner Sky Pill. It tried to open a heaven inside the furnace. That’s the next realm.

[Pill: Inner Sky Pill, Perfect, 5 Mark-grade | Cash: +1.35M, about 10.13M]