Chapter 957 — The Cold Vein

CHAPTER 957

The Cold Vein

Four hundred people watched him light the fire.

The elders sat on the top terrace under a white awning: Grand Elder Zuo Chengjian in the middle, Elder Jing Lanting on his left, three more seats of the elders’ hall beside them. Elder Ye Wanqiu sat at the end of the row, and Shen Yaoqing stood behind her master’s chair in formal white, as the guest’s host. Below them, ring after ring, sat inner disciples, then outer disciples, then stewards and cooks who had found an excuse to be there.

Elder Kong Shuhe stood at the long table by the door with his list. Bai Ruoshuang stood at the door itself.

Shi Feng put his left palm on the cauldron’s side and let the Thousand Forge Flame Art run out of it.

The fire went into the bronze with a low roar. The old metal drank it, and the green on its sides darkened, and the frost on the floor around the three legs pulled back a hand’s breadth.

“Heaven-Root Ginseng,” Shi Feng said, and held out his hand.

Elder Kong put the root into it himself.

Shi Feng kept the first day steady, preparing each herb before trying to combine them. Each herb went into the cauldron in its order and melted down to its essence. The ginseng took nine hours. The Nine-Sky Lotus Seeds took three. The Void Spar Moss wouldn’t melt at all until he folded a pinch of space around it, and then it came apart into grey light. By nightfall eleven essences turned inside the bronze in eleven layers, and half the terraces had gone to bed.

“Is that it?” an outer disciple asked loudly on the fourth ring. “Is that all a Profound Heaven pill is? Stirring?”

“Shut up and watch,” the disciple beside him said. “If you were stirring, the hall would be on fire.”

The second day, the cold vein woke.

It came at noon. Shi Feng felt it first in his palm. The cold climbed out of the floor and up the cauldron’s three legs, slow and strong, and it didn’t stop at the bronze. It went on into the fire.

The north side of the cauldron went white. Frost spread up the metal in a sheet, while the south side still glowed dark red under his hand. Inside, the eleven essences began to pull apart along the line between the hot side and the cold side.

Shi Feng pushed more fire into the bronze.

The cold answered. It came up harder. The frost line on the cauldron didn’t move back an inch, and the bronze between the fire and the cold began to make a sound.

Tick.

On the terraces, four hundred people heard it and went silent.

Tick.

“Stop!” Elder Kong Shuhe said sharply, stepping away from the table. “Master Shi, stop the fire! The bronze is cracking. If the cauldron splits, the herbs are lost and the cauldron with them. The sect’s forty years go into the floor!”

“Elder Kong is right!” someone called from the third ring. “A strong dragon can’t press down a local snake. Nobody beats the vein!”

“He’ll break it! He’ll break the Supreme…” a voice began, and stopped.

Nobody finished it.

Shi Feng didn’t stop the fire. He didn’t push any more into it, either.

He’d been treating the cold as an enemy. The cold vein had supplied the hall for three hundred years and ran deeper than its foundations. If he kept pushing, the fire and the cold would meet in the bronze, and the bronze would lose. He couldn’t win that fight, so he would stop fighting it.

He took his right hand off the cauldron and folded space.

It was a Shattering Void fold, thin and close, one hand’s breadth outside the bronze all the way around. It wrapped the cauldron in a shell of folded space from the rim to the floor. The cold came up the legs and met the fold, and it couldn’t cross it. It pressed against the outside of the shell instead.

And the harder the cold pressed, the tighter the fold sealed.

The frost on the north side stopped climbing. Then it began to melt. The water ran down the bronze in thin lines, and under it the green came back. The ticking stopped.

Shi Feng put his left palm back on the bronze and struck the Second Anvil Fire.

Clang!

The beat ran through the cauldron and rang off the inside of the fold. It couldn’t get out, so it came back in, and the next beat met it.

Clang! Clang!

Nine beats and a rest. Inside the shell, the heat had nowhere to go but the essences. The eleven layers stopped pulling apart and began to press together.

On the terraces, people stood up.

“The frost’s going!”

“He’s not fighting it. Look at the floor, the vein’s still running!”

“He’s put a wall between them. The cold’s on the outside of it!”

“He’s using our cold vein as his furnace wall!”

“…”

On the top terrace, Grand Elder Zuo leaned forward in his chair for the first time that day. Elder Jing Lanting said something low to him, and he didn’t answer.

Elder Kong Shuhe stood very still beside his table. He looked at the cauldron for a long time. Then he picked up his brush and wrote one line on the bottom of his list, and put the brush down.

“Continue,” Elder Kong Shuhe said stiffly.

“Keep everyone back from the fold,” Shi Feng said without turning. “I need to hold it steady.”

Bai Ruoshuang, at the door, made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

The fold cost him. Holding a Shattering Void fold closed for a moment was easy. Holding it closed for a day and a night, with a cold vein leaning on it and a Profound Heaven pill forming inside, pulled steadily at his sea of qi. By midnight his shoulders ached. By the last watch he was sitting on the floor with his back against the bronze, still beating the fire with one hand, and Qin Wuyan stood behind him at the edge of the fold without a word.

“Does the guest elder need anything?” Qin Wuyan asked once, near dawn.

“Breakfast,” Shi Feng said. “Later.”

The third morning came up grey.

When the light reached the bottom of the cut, a disciple on the highest terrace pointed straight up and shouted. Above the smoke hole of the Frost Furnace Hall, a single white cloud had formed in the empty sky.