Chapter 959 — Second Walls

CHAPTER 959

Second Walls

There was one pill at the bottom of the cauldron.

The longan-sized, silver-white pill held a turning thread of lightning. Scorched herbs ringed it. In the cold air, it gave a low, clear ring. Every alchemist on the terraces recognised it.

“One-Tribulation,” someone said on the second ring. “A Profound Heaven One-Tribulation Pill.”

Nobody else spoke.

Shi Feng took a jade case out of his ring. His fingers were black and stiff, and it took him two tries to open the lid. He picked the pill out of the cauldron with a pair of bamboo tongs, laid it in the jade, and closed it.

Grand Elder Zuo Chengjian was already standing in front of him. Nobody had seen him come down from the top terrace. He’d taken one step, and then he was in the hall.

The broad, grey-haired elder watched with steady eyes. Everyone knew he’d stalled at mid Profound Heaven for forty years. None dared mention it.

Shi Feng held out the jade case in both hands.

Grand Elder Zuo looked at the blackened arms for a moment. Then he took the case in both hands, the way a junior takes a gift from a senior, and held it.

Four hundred people watched him hold it. Nobody broke the silence.

“Fast for three days first,” Shi Feng said. His voice came out rough. “Take it at night, sitting on cold stone. For the first ten days, don’t push. Let it widen by itself. If you push, it’ll widen crooked.”

“I hear you,” Grand Elder Zuo Chengjian said quietly.

“Good,” Shi Feng said, struggling to stay upright. “Help me sit down.”

His legs gave out as he lowered himself. Qin Wuyan caught him under the arm and eased him down.

He heard the terraces start shouting all at once. He heard Elder Kong Shuhe’s voice near the door, flat and correct, reading something aloud. Then he didn’t hear anything.

He woke on the bed in Snowpine Court with his arms bound in white linen to the shoulder.

It was night. A brazier burned in the corner. On the table beside the bed sat a jade box with a paper strip pasted across its lid, and on the strip, in a neat hand: Scorched residue, one cauldron. Counted out to the alchemist by rule. Kong.

Shi Feng looked at it and laughed, and his ribs complained.

“Elder Kong brought it himself,” Qin Wuyan said from the dark by the door. “He counted it aloud. To nobody.”

“How long was I asleep?” Shi Feng asked.

“One day,” Qin Wuyan said.

Shi Feng opened the box. The black crust inside was worthless to anyone else on the mountain. To an ordinary body it would be poison. But it still held the qi of every herb that hadn’t gone into the pill, and the herbs had cost eleven million four hundred thousand.

His All-Devouring Physique didn’t care how a herb looked. It only cared what was in it.

He ate the residue a piece at a time, and sat cross-legged on the bed, and went into seclusion.

The herb qi went down into his sea of qi and filled it in an hour. That was the easy part. The hard part was in his bones.

When the tribulation had pulled on his fold, it hadn’t only sent lightning through his arms. It had sent the pull too. A Profound Heaven pressure on space had gone in through his palms and lodged in his arm bones, and it was still there, pressing outward, trying to fold something that wasn’t there.

He let it.

He drew it out of his bones and down into his sea of qi, and wrapped it around the edge of the sea. It was the same thin shell he’d held round the cauldron for a day and a night. It closed. Then it pressed inward, slow and steady, the way the cold vein had pressed on the fold.

His qi pressed down under it. It grew denser, and then denser again, and on the second night, deep in the sea, the wall between mid and late Shattering Void broke.

His sea of qi had a second set of walls now. The fold he’d held around the cauldron had become part of him, and it didn’t come apart.

Late Shattering Void.

He sat for another day to settle it. When he opened his eyes it was nearly dawn, and the brazier had gone out.

He got up, unwound the linen from his arms, and walked out into the courtyard. The skin underneath was pink and new. The snow on the eaves above the door slid loose as he passed under it and fell straight toward his head.

It didn’t reach him.

A thin sheet of space folded in the air a hand above his hair, and the snow landed in the fold and slid off to one side. He hadn’t called it. The Snowfold Screen had opened by itself.

Shi Feng stood in the courtyard and looked at the little heap of snow beside his foot for a while.

“Useful,” Shi Feng said.

Qin Wuyan came out of the gatehouse with his hands in his sleeves. He looked at Shi Feng once, from head to foot, and his eyebrows rose a little.

“Late Shattering Void,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Late Shattering Void,” Shi Feng agreed. “Has anything happened?”

“The outer hall sealed Snowpine Court’s gate two days ago,” Qin Wuyan said. “By the Grand Elder’s order. So that nobody would disturb a guest in seclusion.”

“Did anyone try?” Shi Feng asked.

“Fourteen letters. Two elders’ disciples. One steward with soup,” Qin Wuyan said. “The gate stayed shut.”

He paused.

“Correct,” Qin Wuyan said.

A runner in outer-hall white was already waiting at the sealed gate when they opened it, with a card held in both hands. The Grand Elder asked the honoured guest to come to the outer hall at noon, if he was well enough, to settle the account.