Han Jiu pulled off his coat and trousers and pushed them under the bed with his foot. Qingshuang threw him the wet cloth from the water jar. He scrubbed it through his hair until it came away grey, and he pushed that under the bed too.
He pulled on the old robe he slept in and rubbed his hair until it stuck up.
Qingshuang put her sword back in its scabbard and leaned it by the door. Then she lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket over herself.
Han Jiu lifted the bar and opened the door.
Yun Hai was sitting in a chair in the middle of the courtyard. It was a good chair, carved and lacquered, and it had come from the guest rooms. There was a small teapot on the flagstones beside him and a cup in his hand. He had brought his own tea this time.
"Nephew-in-law," he said. "You sleep very deeply."
"I pulled the cold out of thirty roots for Master Lu yesterday." Han Jiu rubbed his eyes. "Elder Yun, have you been out here all night?"
"Most of it. Old men don’t sleep much." Yun Hai drank. "And I wanted to be the one to tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"Last night, two of my men opened the northernmost shaft. It’s my clan’s shaft, so the seal was mine to break." He set the cup down. "They went all the way down, past the old rockfall. They found two seams where somebody has been cutting frostmarrow out of my clan’s rock. They found a cave where something was pulled out of the ground by the roots. And they found a rope."
Han Jiu waited.
"A moss-cutter’s rope," Yun Hai said. "Green all the way through. You told me yours was in the shed. You might want to go and see if it still is."
"I’ll go and see."
"Do." Yun Hai stood up. "In eleven days, the council will go down that shaft and see all of it for themselves. I’ve put two men at the top, day and night, so that nothing down there changes before then." He looked at Han Jiu’s face, and then at his clean hands. "I wanted you to have eleven days to think about it. Men who have time to think usually do something foolish."
He picked up his teapot and walked away. A servant came out of the kitchens to carry the chair back.
Han Jiu shut the door and put the bar across it.
"He wanted to know if you came home," Qingshuang said from the bed. "Now he wants you to go back up there, so his men can catch you at it."
"Then he’s one night late."
...
Master Lu’s two jars took two mornings. Sixty roots. Sixty stones.
On the second evening, Han Jiu put the stones in Qingshuang’s lap. She looked at them, and then at him. This time, she didn’t argue. She picked them up.
The world went quiet.
[Genuine Investment Detected.]
[Target: Yun Qingshuang.]
[Investment: 60 × low-grade spirit stone.]
[Acquisition: earned by labour.]
[Base return: one hundred-fold.]
[Rebate issued: 6,000 × low-grade spirit stone.]
[Conversions available: 10 × low-grade spirit stone → 1 × frostmarrow, unrefined. 1,000 × low-grade spirit stone → 1 × Body Tempering Pill, Mortal-rank.]
[Specify the split.]
He didn’t need to think about it.
’One pill,’ he thought. ’The rest in frostmarrow.’
[Converted: 1,000 × low-grade spirit stone → 1 × Body Tempering Pill. 5,000 × low-grade spirit stone → 500 × frostmarrow, unrefined.]
Seven hundred and forty pieces of frostmarrow. One pill.
Two days later, he reached the eighth stage above the highest pool. It took a hundred and sixty pieces and most of the afternoon. When it was done, twelve iron bulls rose above his head.
A hundred and ninety-two.
The ninth stage took three hundred and twenty pieces, and it nearly broke him.
Halfway through, the cold stopped going where it was supposed to go. It gathered under his ribs in a hard lump, and it wouldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe properly around it. He sat there with his teeth clenched and waited, and he didn’t take out another piece until the lump had melted away. Then he started again. He was there from noon until the stars came out.
Twenty-four iron bulls. Three hundred and eighty-four.
Han Bo showed two hundred and fifty-six, and he needed an Earth-rank technique running to do it.
Qingshuang made him wait two more days before he took the pill.
"Your body has just been pushed through two stages," she said. "Give it time to settle. If you take the pill too soon, half of it will go to waste, and you won’t get another one."
So he waited. Then he went up to the pools and swallowed it.
The pill went down cold. Then all the Qi he had packed inside himself over nine stages started to push outward. It pushed through his flesh and into his skin, and his skin felt like it was being torn off and pressed back on, all over his body at once.
He took out the frostmarrow and started pressing it against himself. His arms. His chest. His back. His legs. His skin drank the cold in, piece after piece, and the tearing feeling slowly turned into something tight and hard.
When he opened his eyes, a tiger was walking above his head. It was faint and small, and sixteen iron bulls walked in a circle around it.
Body Tempering. Skin layer.
It took him three more days, and two hundred pieces of frostmarrow, before the layer set. On the last evening, he took out his knife and drew the edge across the back of his hand. It left a thin white line. There was no blood.
His skin was pale and smooth all over now, the same as his hands.
When he came home, Qingshuang looked at him. She could feel it. She was at the same layer, so she knew exactly what she was looking at.
"Blessings," she said, and shook her head, and went back to her sword.
...
The council came up the north track on the morning of the twenty-ninth day.
All nine elders came. Han Zhengyuan walked at the front, with his hands in his sleeves. Yun Hai walked beside him. Behind them came Han Bo and his father, and then a line of cousins who had come to watch. Han Jiu and Qingshuang walked at the very back.
Down in the valley, the Coldpeak banners had arrived that morning. Tomorrow, three sects would stand in the outer courtyard.
Yun Hai’s two men were waiting at the shaft. They had been there for eleven days, and they looked like it.
The wax seal was still in the middle of the boards, hard and red. Yun Hai broke it himself and handed it to the patriarch.
"My seal," he said. "Unbroken for eleven days. My men have been here the whole time. Nobody has been down there since the night they found it."
Han Zhengyuan looked at the wax and gave it back.
"Then let’s go and see it," he said.
Yun Hai’s men went down first with lamps. Yun Hai followed, then the patriarch, then two of the elders. Then Yun Hai turned and looked up at Han Jiu.
"The husband comes too," he said.
Han Jiu climbed down.
The cold at the bottom was thick and heavy. The two old elders were shaking before they had gone twenty steps. Han Jiu kept his Qi still and walked behind them with his arms folded, the way a cold man walks.
The lamps went ahead down the tunnel. Then they stopped.
"This is where it was," one of Yun Hai’s men said.
Han Jiu came up behind the others and looked.
A slope of broken rock filled the tunnel from the floor to the ceiling. The dust had settled on it now. It looked like it had been there for a hundred years.
"It was open," the man with the lamp said. "Eleven days ago, there was a gap right here, at the bottom. We crawled through it."
Han Zhengyuan walked up to the rock. He looked at it. Then he turned and looked at the two Yun men.
"You crawled under a rockfall that has been sitting there for sixty years," he said. "On your bellies. And then you dragged yourselves back out again." He shook his head. "It’s a wonder it waited until you were clear."
One of the elders coughed. It sounded a lot like a laugh.
Yun Hai put his hand flat on the rock.
"Then we’ll dig," he said.
"Dig through that?" Han Zhengyuan asked. "Last time, it took this mountain sixty years to settle. The thirty days end at sunrise tomorrow."
"My men saw what was behind it."
"Your men." The patriarch’s voice stayed quiet. "Two Yun cultivators, telling a Han council what they saw in a Yun mine, behind a wall that nobody can open. Elder Yun, you asked this council to come and see evidence. I came. I see rock."
"There’s a rope behind that rock. The boy’s own rope."
Han Zhengyuan turned to Han Jiu.
"Is there?" he asked.
"I don’t know, Grandfather." Han Jiu kept his voice small and tired. "Eleven days ago, somebody took my rope out of the moss shed. I thought one of the kitchen boys needed it. I’ve been cutting moss without it ever since."
Nobody said anything.
Han Zhengyuan looked at Han Jiu. Then he looked at the two Yun men, who had found a moss-cutter’s rope at the bottom of a Yun shaft on the same night that a moss-cutter’s rope went missing from a Han shed. Then he looked at Yun Hai.
"The review is closed," he said. "The marriage stands."
He turned around and walked back toward the light.
...
When they climbed back out into the morning, the cousins were already talking. Han Jiu could hear the word "rope" going from mouth to mouth.
Qingshuang came and stood next to him. She didn’t say anything. She just stood close enough that her sleeve touched his.
On the other side of the clearing, Yun Hai walked over to Han Bo.
He reached into his sleeve and took out a small black pill. He put it in Han Bo’s hand and closed Han Bo’s fingers over it. He said something too quietly for anyone else to hear.
Han Bo looked down at his closed hand.
Then he looked across the clearing at Han Jiu, and he smiled.