Chapter 977 — Seven Clouds over Shuoyang

CHAPTER 977

Seven Clouds over Shuoyang

The fourth herb went into the furnace in the middle of the afternoon, and the whole tower square went quiet.

The furnace room’s doors stood open onto the square, as Shi Feng had wanted, and the Yelü had come in force to watch their own herbs burn. Forty of them stood along the back wall in grey furs. Behind them the square was packed to the gate.

Yelü Hong sat at a table beside the furnace. He was still broad in the shoulders, with a grey beard, and he kept his left hand flat on the table because he could no longer close it. The failed reach for Profound Heaven eight years ago had frozen half his meridians solid, down the whole left side of his body.

“Snow Dragon ginseng,” Yan Lianbi read from the herb list, and set it on the tray. “The fourth of nine. Weighed twice, Master Shi.”

“Thank you, Steward Yan,” Shi Feng said, and fed it in.

Everything depended on holding the heat back. If the fire woke before the pill entered the frozen channels, it would burn their brittle walls, as the Blazing Sun Pill had. He couldn’t allow that.

So he kept the Second Anvil Fire low. He beat it slowly, one count and a long rest, and let the Thousand Forge Flame lie along the furnace walls in a thin, even skin of heat. The herbs went into the furnace pale blue. They had to come out pale blue.

“Why is the fire so small?” someone whispered at the door. “For a pill that big?”

“Shut up. You’ll make him look at you.”

“Ice three feet thick didn’t freeze in one cold day,” an old Yelü servant muttered, wringing his hands. “It won’t melt in one either.”

Shi Feng didn’t look at anyone. Fifth herb. Sixth. The seventh was the core of the Sunfire Jujube, a red seed the size of a fingernail, the only warm thing on the list. He wrapped it in three layers of cold qi before he let it touch the rest. It had to sleep inside the pill until the pill was inside the patient.

Qin Wuyan stood by the inner door with his hands in his sleeves. He hadn’t moved since morning.

At the ninth herb, the furnace lid rang.

Shi Feng lifted his palm away. The furnace went silent, and above the tower roof the sky changed.

One white cloud gathered over the square. Then a second. Every head in the square tipped back at once, and the noise came back louder than before.

“Three! That’s three!”

“There’s a fifth on the east side! Look!”

“Six… seven…”

The seventh cloud settled over the tower and stayed. No eighth came.

Shi Feng breathed out and opened the lid. One pill lay at the bottom of the furnace, pale blue with a thin red line through it. It was so cold that frost was growing on the furnace rim.

“Seven clouds,” Yan Lianbi said, and wrote it down. “Major Success. Steward’s witness.”

Shi Feng carried the pill to the table on a jade plate.

“Swallow it whole, Patriarch Yelü,” Shi Feng said, setting the plate down. “First it’ll feel like eating snow. Then it’ll feel like eating a coal. Don’t move until the heat reaches your dantian.”

Yelü Hong looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up the pill with two stiff fingers and swallowed it.

His face went white. Frost formed on his beard. The Yelü along the back wall leaned forward together.

Then the red line woke up.

Yelü Hong shuddered. Steam rose off his shoulders, then off his chest, and the frost on his beard ran down as water. A long crack sounded inside his left arm, then another lower down, and his left hand closed on the edge of the table.

The edge of the table snapped off in his fist.

Yelü Hong stared at the broken wood. Then he opened his hand and closed it again.

“Father!” the Yelü heir shouted from the wall. The family’s fear gave way to joy, and they rushed forward together.

Yelü Hong stood up. For the first time in eight years, nobody had to hold his elbow. His pressure rolled off him, the full force of peak Shattering Void, and every lamp in the furnace room flickered.

“It’s open,” Yelü Hong said hoarsely, pressing a hand to his belly. “All of it. From the fingers to the dantian.”

“Don’t push qi through it for seven days, Patriarch Yelü,” Shi Feng said, wiping his hands. “The channel walls are thin. If you run your art through them now, you’ll be back in that chair.”

Yelü Hong laughed out loud and bowed to him from the waist, a full northern bow.

The Yelü paid at the same table. Eight hundred thousand in stone notes, counted out by the patriarch himself with the hand that had just learned to close again. Shi Feng counted it a second time and put it in his ring. He was carrying about seventeen million five hundred and eighty thousand now.

“There’s one more thing the Yelü want to give,” Yelü Hong said when the money was put away, and he lowered his voice. “The Censorate’s hearing. Let this old man stand up in it as your character witness. The whole north knows the Yelü name. The commission will have to listen.”

The room went quiet. Yan Lianbi looked at Shi Feng and said nothing.

“Thank you, Patriarch Yelü,” Shi Feng said seriously. “But I can’t let you do that. You’ve already paid for your treatment. You don’t owe me testimony.”

“Why not?” Yelü Hong asked, frowning.

“Whoever wants me charged hasn’t put his own name on anything,” Shi Feng said quietly. “If you stand up in that hall for me, he’ll learn yours. You’ve just got your arm back. I’d like you to keep it.”

Yelü Hong was silent for a while. Then he nodded slowly.

“Then we’ll sit,” Yelü Hong said, and his eyes narrowed. “The gallery’s open to anyone, isn’t it? Forty Yelü in grey furs in the front rows, every day. Nobody can call that testimony.”

“Nobody can,” Yan Lianbi said, before Shi Feng could answer. “Gallery seats are first come, first served, Patriarch Yelü. I’d come early.”

By evening the teahouses had a new story, and it wasn’t about the pill.

“The Yelü are taking the front rows.”

“For the accused? All forty of them?”

“Nobody sits forty men in a hall for a murderer.”

“A clean conscience doesn’t fear a knock at midnight,” the teahouse keeper said, pouring. “The Yelü know that better than anyone.”

Shuoyang had decided something that no commissioner had said yet.

At the city gate, a clan in white mourning had just finished writing out a petition.