Chapter 942 — Vein-Thawing Pill

CHAPTER 942

Vein-Thawing Pill

The braziers went out one by one, and the Zhangsun elders turned pale with every one.

“Master Shi,” an elder said in a shaking voice. “If he dies cold, the clan will—”

“He won’t get colder,” Shi Feng said, already walking out to the courtyard. “Watch his beard.”

Within a quarter of an hour the frost on Zhangsun Gang’s beard had stopped spreading. Pan Shouren crouched by the stone bed and stared at it. Then he ran out after Shi Feng.

“It stopped!” Pan Shouren said. “Master Shi, how did you know?”

“A frost-vein seizure feeds on heat,” Shi Feng said, and opened the lid of the clan’s courtyard furnace. “Every warm thing near it, it pulls in and turns into more ice. Your braziers were feeding it. So were your pills. Each one went down warm, and the frost ate it before it got to the veins.”

“Then how does any pill reach them?” Pan Shouren asked.

“It goes in looking cold,” Shi Feng said.

The courtyard was open to the sky. The Zhangsun clan had climbed onto every gallery and roof around it in their furs. Qin Wuyan stood under the gate arch with his hands in his sleeves.

Shi Feng laid out Pan Shouren’s herbs on a tray in the snow. Every one of them was right. Then he took one more thing from his own ring, a small grey shell as thin as paper.

“Frost Cicada slough,” Pan Shouren whispered. “But that’s a cooling herb. It’ll fight the fire.”

“I’ll put it around the fire herbs,” Shi Feng said. “The cold shell will hide the heat until it reaches the veins.”

He lit the Thousand Forge Flame under the cauldron, and the snow in a ring around the furnace melted in one breath.

The Vein-Thawing Pill was a 5 Mark-grade pill, and its heart was nothing unusual: three fire herbs to open frozen channels, two blood herbs to move what thawed, a root to bind them. Shi Feng refined that heart the ordinary way, hot and fast, until a red core of fire qi turned in the bottom of the cauldron. That took an hour.

Then he ground the cicada slough to dust between his fingers and dropped it in.

The cauldron hissed. Frost ran up the outside of the bronze, white and sudden, and Pan Shouren cried out and jumped back. Shi Feng beat the Second Anvil Fire into the cauldron in a slow count, nine beats and a rest, and with each beat the cold dust closed tighter around the red core. It wrapped the fire in a shell of frost qi and sealed it.

The frost would see a cold thing coming and let it through. When the shell reached the vein roots and cracked, the fire inside would open where it was needed.

At the second hour, the first cloud rose over the Zhangsun fortress.

“A cloud!”

They kept rising. Three, four, five. Pan Shouren stopped breathing at six. At seven the whole clan was on its feet on the roofs. When the eighth cloud rose and stood still in a perfect ring over the courtyard, nobody shouted at all.

“Eight,” Pan Shouren said hoarsely. “Perfect. In a courtyard. In the snow.”

Shi Feng lifted the lid. The pill inside was white with frost on the outside, and if he looked closely, a red light turned inside it.

He carried it into the cold hall himself and put it between Zhangsun Gang’s blue lips.

For ten breaths nothing happened.

Then the patriarch’s chest heaved. A crack of steam came out of his collar. The frost on his beard turned to water and ran down onto the stone, and colour came up into his face from the neck, red and angry and alive. Zhangsun Gang opened his eyes, coughed until the bed shook, and sat up.

“Wine,” Zhangsun Gang said hoarsely. “Who put out my braziers? Bring me wine!”

The relieved elders shouted for wine. Pan Shouren hurried to block the braziers, afraid someone would light them before he could check the patriarch again.

The Zhangsun paid that evening, 1.6 million in stone notes, counted onto a table in the patriarch’s hall without a word of bargaining. Shi Feng counted them again and put them in his ring.

Pan Shouren waited until the hall had emptied a little. Then he came up and bowed so low his hat nearly fell off.

“Master Shi,” Pan Shouren said humbly. “Three times I failed with the right formula. A gentleman is never too old to learn. Next time you come, may this humble one watch your hands?”

“You watched them this time,” Shi Feng said. “Next time, stand closer.”

Pan Shouren laughed, and for the first time all day he stopped sweating.

The feast began at dusk, and halfway through it, the heir came in.

Zhangsun Lie was big like his father, with a loud laugh and a long black spear resting on one shoulder. A red tassel hung below its head. His aura was late Shattering Void and he didn’t bother to hide it. He was seventeenth on the Tianxing.

He stopped in front of Shi Feng’s seat and planted the spear’s butt on the stone floor.

“Master Shi,” Zhangsun Lie said, grinning. “My father’s alive, and he’s drunk already. The clan owes you his life. That’s a big debt.” He bowed, properly, with both fists. “In the north, when a clan owes a man that much, the heir measures him with his own hands, so the clan knows how big the man is and how big the debt is. It’s an old custom. You can refuse.”

“You’ve been waiting to ask that since you came in,” Shi Feng said. “I accept. Where do you want to stand?”

Zhangsun Lie threw back his head and laughed.

“You don’t fight, you don’t know each other!” Zhangsun Lie said. “The yard. Now, before Father drinks the moon down.”

Out in the night courtyard, torches had already been lit. Qin Wuyan walked to the middle of the snow and stopped. The snow sank under his pressure in a straight line, then turned, and turned again, until a square forty paces across was pressed flat into the courtyard floor, every edge as sharp as a cut.

“Inside the line is yours,” Qin Wuyan said to the two young men, and stepped out of it. “Outside the line is this one’s.”

Zhangsun Lie took his spear off his shoulder and spun it once.

As the head went round, a low sound came out of it. It wasn’t the hum of steel. It rose and fell in the dark, long and cold.

It was the howl of a wolf.