Chapter 976 — The Frozen Half

CHAPTER 976

The Frozen Half

The Yelü patriarch lay on a litter of black bearskin in the middle of the tower square, and half of him was white.

Yelü Hong was still broad-shouldered. Above his white beard, the right half of his face was ruddy and lined; the left was snow-white. Frost covered his left eyebrow and jaw and ran from his shoulder across his chest toward his right hip. His hands lay stiff on the bearskin.

Eight men of the Yelü house stood around the litter in grey fox furs. The eldest of them stepped forward and bowed to Shi Feng as he came down the tower steps.

“Guest Elder,” the Yelü heir said. “This is my father, Yelü Hong, Patriarch of the Yelü. Eight years ago he tried to step into Profound Heaven, and he failed. Half his meridians have been frozen ever since. Three 5 Marks have looked at him. Two said there was nothing to be done. One tried, and my father nearly died.”

“Peak Shattering Void,” Shi Feng said, looking at the old man.

“For eight years, peak Shattering Void with half a body,” Yelü Hong said. He spoke slowly, from the right side of his mouth only. “This old man has heard what you did for the Zhangsun’s patriarch. And for the Serene Jade’s Grand Elder. The Yelü will pay eight hundred thousand, Guest Elder. If you’ll look.”

The square had filled while he spoke. The Yelü were one of the great houses of the north, and their patriarch hadn’t been seen in public for eight years.

“I’ll look,” Shi Feng said. “If I can do it, you’ll pay after it works.”

“And if you can’t?” the Yelü heir asked.

“Then you won’t pay anything,” Shi Feng said. “And I’ll tell you why I can’t, so the next alchemist doesn’t try what the third one tried.”

Yelü Hong’s right eye closed for a moment.

“Agreed,” Yelü Hong said.

The Yelü heir glanced toward the tower’s side door, where the furnace room was.

“Guest Elder, my father would prefer… somewhere private,” the Yelü heir said, lowering his voice. “For the house’s face.”

“I understand,” Shi Feng said, lowering his voice. “But I need to treat him where people can see us. Let me explain before you decide.”

The Yelü heir’s expression changed.

“I’m named in an inquiry that sits here soon,” Shi Feng said, plainly enough for the men nearest the litter to hear. “If I take eight hundred thousand from a great house of the north behind a shut door, just before the hearing, the Censorate will call it a bribe by tonight. And you’ll be the house that paid it. With the furnace room’s doors open, half the city can see that what you paid for was a pill.”

The Yelü heir stared at him. Then he bowed again, lower than before.

“Then carry him in,” Shi Feng said.

Shi Feng opened the furnace room’s double doors onto the square. The Yelü carried their patriarch to a chair beside the furnace. Pavilion attendants roped off the doorway, and the crowd pressed against the rope.

“He’s going to do it right there? In front of everyone?”

“Real gold doesn’t fear fire. If he were a fraud, he’d have shut the door.”

“Three 5 Marks gave up on the Yelü patriarch!”

“Then it’s a good thing he isn’t a 5 Mark.”

Yan Lianbi came down and stood at the inside edge of the rope, with his single sheet of paper folded in his sleeve. Qin Wuyan stood in the doorway.

Shi Feng knelt beside the chair and took Yelü Hong’s frozen left wrist in his hand. It was so cold it burned. He didn’t touch a single herb yet.

He sent a thread of qi into the wrist, and his Spirit Sense with it.

The meridians on the right side of Yelü Hong’s body were wide and strong, the meridians of a peak Shattering Void cultivator who had spent sixty years cultivating. The meridians on the left side were solid. They weren’t blocked. They were ice all the way through, in layer after layer.

Shi Feng followed the ice inward, one channel at a time, until he reached the dantian.

There it was. Eight years ago, Yelü Hong had tried to open his inner heaven. It had opened a crack and then closed again, hard. All the qi he’d gathered for the attempt had been thrown back on him, and the closing had frozen it in place. The freeze had started at the dantian and spread outward, from his left shoulder down to his right hip, through half his channels. So the ice was thickest at the centre, and thinnest at his fingertips.

Shi Feng released the wrist and sat back. He was relieved to have traced the cause, but careless treatment could still destroy the frozen channels. He needed the family to understand that.

“The third 5 Mark gave you a fire pill,” Shi Feng said. “Didn’t he? Something strong, to melt it all at once.”

“A Blazing Sun Pill,” the Yelü heir said, shocked. “How did you know?”

“Because a fire pill burns from the outside,” Shi Feng said. “Frozen channels are brittle. The heat reaches the channel walls long before it reaches the ice inside them, and the walls crack. That’s why he nearly died.”

The Yelü men looked at each other in shock. Yelü Hong’s breathing grew harsh. They remembered the failed treatment and now understood why it had almost killed him.

“So how is it done, Guest Elder?” Yelü Hong asked slowly.

“The pill goes in as cold as the ice,” Shi Feng said. “Cold doesn’t crack ice, so it can sink all the way into the frozen channels. Only when it’s inside them does it turn warm, from its own centre outward, so the ice melts from within and the walls never feel the fire. And it has to go into you straight from the furnace, at this table.”

He stood and opened his herb chest.

Nine herbs. A pale Ice Marrow Root. A Red Frost Lotus. A thick root of Snow Dragon ginseng, and five more cold herbs in jade boxes. At the bottom, wrapped in oiled paper, lay a red ember seed the size of a fingernail, the only warm thing on the list. Eight cold herbs to sink into the ice, and one warm seed asleep inside them to melt it from within.

A Profound Heaven-grade pill. The Ice Marrow Renewal Pill.

Shi Feng laid the herbs out on the stone bench in order. Then he knelt by the chair again and took the frozen wrist.

“Not today,” Shi Feng said. “I want every frozen channel followed to its end before a single herb goes in. I’ll light the furnace tomorrow morning, with these doors open.”

He spent the rest of the day with two fingers on the old man’s wrist. By dark the Yelü had carried their patriarch up to the tower’s guest rooms, and the crowd outside the rope still hadn’t gone home.

By morning there were four times as many of them.