Ch. 052| Can't Afford to Provoke

Early on the ten-day rest, Lin Que went down the mountain, and first turned into Well-Bottom Lane.

Han Bosheng was not in. That broken door stood ajar; a dish of damp peanuts, half-eaten, sat on the threshold, and a wine bowl lay overturned on the ground, the cheap wine it had spilled not yet dried. But the man was nowhere in sight.

"Looking for Han Nine-Lives?" The old fellow mending pots next door leaned half his body out and jerked his chin toward the back mountain. "Ran off into the hills before it was even light, hot and hasty, didn't leave a word."

Lin Que's heart sank.

A man like Han Bosheng, who prized his own skin to the marrow, wouldn't lightly go up to that blighted ground on the back mountain before dawn. Only one thing could send him running like that—his old pill-kiln.

Lin Que turned and hurried for the back mountain.

---

By the time he reached the back mountain, the sun had just climbed over the ridge.

The old pill-kiln was still there. But that stretch of blighted ground before it had changed.

Where before the stock-diggers had been sparse, a spadeful here, a spadeful there, today a great dark crowd of them pressed in. Dozens of men, spade by spade, the earth flying up. A newly-dug trench cut in a straight furrow from the far side of the blighted ground, its head already less than a hundred paces from the foot of the old pill-kiln.

Han Bosheng crouched at the kiln mouth, stuffing the jars and pots and pill-furnace gear inside into an old sack, any which way. Seeing Lin Que come, he didn't even lift his head; his voice was savage. "Good timing. Lend a hand. This nest—there's no keeping it."

Lin Que went into the kiln and crouched to help. That little store they'd built up—the few pill-materials traded from rift-hunting, the tools of half Han Bosheng's life—went into the sack piece by piece.

"When I came to look the other day, they were still half a li off." Han Bosheng wrapped a pill-furnace in a rag and stuffed it into the sack, then spat. "In one night, they've dug this close. Is this digging for stock? It's turning this whole stretch of ground bottom-up. Another two days and this kiln'll be under their spades."

"You think they've come to dig stock?" He jerked his chin down the slope. "Stock-diggers don't dig through the night by torchlight. Those few overseers with the jade tokens have been nailed to the slope these two days, cursing anyone who rests his hand, docking his wages. They're not digging stock—they're looking for something, in a hurry to find it."

As he spoke, one of the stock-diggers down the slope, spade on his shoulder, ambled over toward the broken kiln, as if seeking a private spot to relieve himself.

Han Bosheng's eyelids lifted; unhurried, he snatched up a chipped clay pot from the kiln's edge, flung it "clang" at the man's feet, and bawled at the top of his voice: "Blind, are you! This is my grave-tending ground. One step nearer, and you'll disturb the old master sleeping below—best watch what's left of your natural span!"

The man, cowed by this bolt-from-nowhere tirade, and finding the broken kiln truly ill-omened, spat sullenly, shouldered his spade, and fell back down the slope.

Only then did Han Bosheng cinch the sack's mouth and drop his voice. "See that? They're this frantic." He crouched there, catching his breath, his face sunk dark enough to drip water—this old pill-kiln was the last place in this world where he'd felt at peace.

Lin Que was in no rush to take up his words. He helped Han Bosheng wrap the last medicine jar, then crouched down beside him.

"Uncle Han." He dropped his voice. "That lot digging so frantically—I think I know why."

Han Bosheng lifted his eyes.

"I got into the forbidden court," Lin Que said. "That stone house—I saw inside it."

Han Bosheng's hand, stuffing the sack, halted. "…You got in? That place—even true-lineage disciples can't get in—"

"What's inside, I won't tell in detail." Lin Que cut him off. The sight of bed after bed in that stone house he did not care to revisit even in the night, still less to recount word by word to another. He took only the most vital and told it—in the stone house, a row of wooden beds, five or six living men bound to them. A thing with its back to the door, off those still-breathing men, eating the flesh from their bodies, mouthful by mouthful.

"There's one in there I know." At the end, he paused. "That outer-gate youth from a while back—the one who went into qi deviation striking for the sixth layer, was carried off, and everyone took for dead. He isn't dead."

Han Bosheng had, at some point, poured himself another half-bowl of wine; now that bowl gave a jolt, and spilled onto his knee, and he didn't feel it at all. In his life, in the rifts and out on the rivers-and-lakes, he'd seen no few ways to die; but those two words, "eating men," still, for the first time, sent a chill down his spine.

He was silent a long while—long enough that Lin Que thought he'd not speak again.

"Lin, lad." He finally spoke, each word wrung out through his teeth. "Let me give you a word from the heart. This business—you saw it, so treat it as though you didn't. Forget it."

Lin Que did not answer.

"How've I lived to this age? On what?" Han Bosheng stared at him. "Four words—can't afford it, dodge it. The forbidden court is the Xuanzhao Sect's ground; that 'Teacher' who can eat a man in full view—even the powers over the Xuanzhao Sect have to read his face. Those who looked into this business—you've seen how they end—Senior Brother Xu, a 'misstep' on the mountain road at night, smashed to pulp. Those eyes of yours are a treasure beyond price; hide them well, build up your cultivation, wait ten years, twenty, until you've got the strength, and then we'll talk. Go touch it now—you're not going to save people, you're going to add one more corpse to those wooden beds."

Not a word of this could Lin Que refute. With his present cultivation, with the skill he kept hidden, to rush into the forbidden court was to walk into death. Outside that door-crack, in that moment, he'd already thought this reasoning through.

Yet he was in no rush to answer. He only raised a hand and pointed down the slope, at that dark crowd of stock-diggers.

"Uncle Han's right. I can't afford it," he said. "But look down there—it's already dug to the foot of your kiln."

Han Bosheng followed his hand and looked down, and his face sank another shade.

"Didn't you say the other day the jade-token lot were scrambling to make up a sum, that trouble was near?" Lin Que said. "The people propping up the forbidden court are tying off the ends. To tie them off, they've got to dig this stretch of ground clean of stock, down to the roots. Your kiln happens to be buried in the ground they mean to turn. They haven't come meaning to trouble you—but where the spade passes, it'll lift your nest along with everything else."

"Dodge." Lin Que looked at him. "Dodge where? It's dug to your very door."

Han Bosheng fell silent.

Lin Que knew that in his youth Han Bosheng had gone into a rift—five men went in, and he alone came out alive. How the other four were lost, he never spoke of, and Lin Que had never asked. But now, watching the sunken look on the old man's face, Lin Que suddenly understood that those four lives had all these years pressed on the heaviest spot in his heart—pressed until, for half his life, he'd walked wide of any deep water.

"I'm not asking you to come stake your life with me." Lin Que softened his voice. "What you taught me—don't get greedy in a rift, keep a way back, see how deep the water runs before you set your foot down—none of that do I throw away. When I move on that place, I'll never storm it head-on; storming it head-on is a fool's game. What I want is someone who can read the depth of the water, to help me carry this life of mine whole out of that place."

"In all this market town, the one who can read the depth and be trusted"—he looked at Han Bosheng—"is you alone."

Han Bosheng lowered his head and stared a long time at that pool of spilled wine on his knee.

"…You lad," he finally said, something hard to name in his voice, "you're of a piece with those four brothers of mine. Once you've set your mind, nine oxen couldn't drag you back."

He raised his head. That muddy wine-haze in his eyes was gone entirely; left was only an old rover who'd weighed the stakes from end to end, and then the clear-eyed resignation of a man who's accepted his lot.

"I'll say the ugly words first." Han Bosheng said. "If it's a head-on clash, a walk into death, I'll be the first to turn on my heel and go. But if you truly have a way to move on that place without walking into death—"

He lifted that bowl with its scant half of wine, and drained it in one draught.

"Count me in."

---

The wine down his throat, the whole temper of the man changed. That old fellow who'd hunched his neck and urged him to "dodge" was gone; crouched before him was an old rover with a light in his eyes, beginning to reckon the angles.

"To move on that stone house, on your eyes alone, these old bones of mine, and that talisman-shop girl on top—far from enough." He counted on his fingers. "That's a sect's ground. Storm it head-on and you die. To move it, you've got to borrow a greater force, to bear down on it."

"A greater force?"

"Isn't there an enforcement disciple in the Xuanzhao Sect looking into those few qi-deviation deaths? You mentioned her—surnamed Shen." Han Bosheng said. "The one on the official side can't move her inquiry because the powers above have choked the thread dead—she's got a waist-token and nothing to show for it, can't dig up hard proof. But in your hands is exactly what she can't get: that stone house you saw with your own eyes, that youth who isn't dead. She has the official waist-token, you have the thing seen. Put the two together, and 'can't be looked into' can be forced into 'has to be looked into.'"

Lin Que's heart stirred. Shen Ningshuang.

"But," Han Bosheng suddenly dropped his voice, "when you go see this Shen, there's one thing to watch. The matter of those eyes of yours—not one word can leak. A herb-lodge menial, how did he get into the forbidden court, how does he see the flaws in a man's meridians—let that get out, and she'll be the first to take you for a demon-man and haul you off."

"Then how do I make her believe?"

"You needn't make her believe what you saw." Han Bosheng's eyes narrowed. "You give her only a thread she can follow herself—the stone house opening at the hour of the Ox every three days to take in stock, which way the stock-cart goes, who that bound youth is. The rest, let that enforcement skill of hers dig out on its own. What she digs out with her own hands, that she'll believe, and that she'll act on."

Lin Que nodded. The words made sense. What his eyes saw could not be spoken; but the solid threads that could be followed along the official side were exactly what he could hand her.

Han Bosheng slung the sack of gear he'd carried out over his shoulder, and gave one last look at this old pill-kiln he'd lived in for a good many years, and could no longer keep.

"The kiln—I'll shift it first to that empty room in the back lane of the Listening-Rain Tower." He spat, as if spitting out that pang of reluctance along with the spittle. "Your business—once you've got this Shen in hand, come find me."

He shouldered the sack, took a couple of steps down the slope, then turned back and added one line: "Remember—not walking into death is what gives you a next time."

Lin Que answered, and turned to go down the other side of the slope. The sun had already climbed the ridge, lighting that stock-digging trench to a stark white glare, spade by spade, the earth still turning.

He looked back once at that old pill-kiln that could no longer be lived in, and quickened his step. The first person to see was Shen Ningshuang.

【Ch. 052 End · Well-Bottom Lane, Qingqi Market → the old pill-kiln on the back mountain of the Xuanzhao Sect】