Chapter 955 — The Zhongli Ancestor

CHAPTER 955

The Zhongli Ancestor

The pressure came down on Lianxia an hour before dawn, and every dog in town started barking at once.

Shi Feng woke in the guest room above the Caili pavilion and lay still, feeling it. It sat over the north end of town without moving. It wasn’t Qin Wuyan’s. Qin Wuyan’s pressure was always shut tight. This one stood wide open, and whoever owned it didn’t know yet how to close it.

He’d only come down the white stair to buy two minor herbs the sect’s treasury didn’t stock, and had stayed the night.

Qin Wuyan was already standing in the corridor in his grey robe. He hadn’t gone to bed.

“Profound Heaven,” Qin Wuyan said. “New. North end of town.”

“The Zhongli compound is at the north end of town,” Shi Feng said, pulling on his outer robe.

“Yes,” Qin Wuyan said.

Downstairs the shutters stood open, and half the street was out in the snow in sleeping robes.

“Manager Kang, what is that?” a porter shouted from across the street. “Is the mountain angry?”

“It’s not the mountain, you fool! It’s coming from the Zhongli place!”

“The old ancestor? Then he’s either dead or he’s done it!”

“Elder Shi, is it the pill?” Kang Yi asked, bowing with the lamp still in his hand.

“It feels like he succeeded,” Shi Feng said. “Let’s wait for word from the house. Bring some tea, please.”

Word came before the tea was cold.

At first light the pressure began to move. It came down the main street at a walking pace, and the people in the snow pressed back against the house walls to let it by. It belonged to an old man in a plain brown fur coat, bareheaded, with a white beard tucked into his belt. He walked without a stick. Behind him came Zhongli Jue, the grandson who had watched every pass of Shi Feng’s hands in this yard twenty-four days ago.

Zhongli Cangsong stopped at the pavilion’s step. He looked up at the signboard, then at the young man in the doorway.

Then the ancestor of the Zhongli clan, the oldest power in the north for a hundred years, put his fists together and bowed from the waist.

The street went silent.

“The ancestor bowed!”

“To the alchemist? To the young one?”

“…”

Shi Feng came down the step and bowed back, lower.

“Patriarch Zhongli,” Shi Feng said, straightening. “You shouldn’t be walking in the snow on your first morning.”

“I’m walking because of your hand,” Zhongli Cangsong said. His voice was rough and slow, and it carried down the whole street. “My grandson stood in this yard and watched it hold my life. This old man came to see the hand himself, so I won’t owe a stranger for it.”

He took Shi Feng’s right hand and turned it over, looking at the burn ridges.

“Young,” Zhongli Cangsong said at last. “Too young. Jue, you were right. I’d have called you a liar.”

“I told you, Grandfather!” Zhongli Jue said, grinning. “Every pass. He never once looked at the herbs.”

“I looked at them,” Shi Feng said. “Before I lit the fire.”

Kang Yi poured for the old man in the counting room and had the sense to leave. By the door, Qin Wuyan and the old man exchanged one nod, equal to equal.

Shi Feng had carried one question since the night of the Inner Sky Pill. When the pill sealed in the furnace, he’d felt it try to open a small space inside itself before it closed. Now the one man in the north who’d just walked into the next realm was drinking his tea.

“Patriarch, may I ask you something plainly?” Shi Feng asked.

“Ask,” Zhongli Cangsong said, lifting his cup. “This morning you can ask me anything.”

“What did it feel like?” Shi Feng asked. “When the inner heaven opened.”

The old man didn’t answer at once. He held the cup and watched the steam. Zhongli Jue started to speak, and his grandfather lifted one finger, and he stopped.

“I sat for twenty days and felt nothing,” Zhongli Cangsong said slowly. “I thought the pill had failed, or that I had. On the twenty-first night I stopped pushing, because I was tired. And then it was there.” He set the cup down. “For a hundred and ninety years, that space had been inside me without my knowing it. Your pill didn’t create it. It let me find the opening.”

Shi Feng took out his small private book and his brush and wrote the sentence down word for word.

Zhongli Cangsong watched him do it and laughed, one short bark.

“A 6 Mark taking notes from an old man,” Zhongli Cangsong said.

“You’re the only man in the north who’s opened an inner heaven this year,” Shi Feng said, blowing on the ink. “The pill let me feel one forming. I still need to understand how a cultivator opens his own.”

“Then that’s my fee to you,” Zhongli Cangsong said. He stood. “The silver was paid. This isn’t silver. If any house north of Frost Pass makes trouble for you, send the Zhongli its name.”

“I’ll remember it, Patriarch,” Shi Feng said, and stood to see him out.

By noon the north knew.

It went out on every sledge and courier horse: the Zhongli ancestor had come out of his closed doors at early Profound Heaven, and a 6 Mark’s pill had made him.

“The withered tree has met spring again!” the teahouse owner across the street shouted to anyone who would listen. “I saw the clouds over this yard with my own eyes!”

In the afternoon, outer disciple Shu Wan rode down the white stair on the guest horse and found Shi Feng in the pavilion’s herb store, weighing his two herbs.

“Master Shi,” Shu Wan said, bowing. “Gate Elder Qiu asked me to tell you the commission letters in the outer hall have doubled since this morning. He’s had to send for a second table.”

“Did he say who they’re from?” Shi Feng asked.

“Every house that can write, he said,” Shu Wan said. “And Elder Kong asked me to say the Frost Furnace Hall is ready. He’ll be waiting at the door with the treasury list at dawn.”

Qin Wuyan, by the herb store’s door, looked up at the white stair.

“He will be early,” Qin Wuyan said.