He got back to the storeroom in the middle of the afternoon. He had no moss, no coppers, and his sleeves were still dry.
Yun Qingshuang was awake. She had cleaned the room while he was gone, and that surprised him more than anything else that had happened in two days. She had swept the stones outside. Everything Han Bo had thrown out there was back inside, stacked neatly against the wall. Even the dead man’s socks.
She was sitting on the bed with her sword across her knees, the way she always did.
"You didn’t cut any moss," she said.
"No."
"You were gone for four hours, and you came back with nothing at all. So either you sat by the water feeling sorry for yourself, or you were doing maths."
"I was doing maths," said Han Jiu.
"And?"
"Two hundred and fifty years." He sat down on the floor under the window, because his legs were tired. "That’s how long I’d have to cut moss to reach the number the sects want. I worked it out four times. I kept getting the same answer."
Yun Qingshuang didn’t say anything to comfort him. He hadn’t expected her to, and he was grateful for that.
"So you need something that isn’t moss," she said.
"I need something big. Something that’s worth a lot, that nobody is watching, and that I can carry out on my back." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I thought about every place in this valley on the walk back, and there’s nothing. Everything here belongs to somebody. And that somebody is either my clan or yours."
"There’s the mine."
Han Jiu lowered his hands and looked at her.
"You’ve thought about it too," she said. "You’ve been thinking about it since you left this morning. And you came back here hoping I’d talk you out of it."
"That’s not why I came back."
"It’s partly why you came back."
He didn’t argue, because she was right.
"There are four old mine shafts on Han land," he said. "My clan dug them sixty years ago, following the cold vein. Then, in one winter, the mountain collapsed on all four of them and killed eleven men. My clan sealed them up and never went back."
"And then my clan sealed them again."
"With boards, and iron, and a Yun Clan seal on every one." Han Jiu picked at a splinter in the floorboard. "They didn’t even want the shafts. They just wanted the papers to say that every hole in this valley belonged to them."
"Then you know what it means to break one of those seals." Yun Qingshuang’s voice stayed exactly the same. "My uncle is sitting in your ancestral hall right now, drinking your grandfather’s tea, waiting for one more thing to write down. If you break a Yun seal, he’ll drag you in front of the council before the boards even hit the ground."
"Only if he finds out."
"He’ll be here for thirty days, with nothing else to do."
"Then I’ll go at night. And I’ll put the boards back afterwards."
"You’ve already decided," she said. "You decided on the walk back. And you’ve been looking for someone to tell you it’s a bad plan, so you can feel like a careful man."
"Is it a bad plan?"
"It’s a terrible plan." She moved the sword off her knees and put it down next to her on the bed. She hadn’t done that once since she arrived. "Come sit closer. If you’re going down into a crushed cold vein tonight, there are things you need to know. And I’m not going to shout them across the room."
He moved to the end of the bed, and she told him about mines.
She had never been inside one. But the Coldpeak Sect had taught her for eleven years, and part of that was learning what cultivators find inside mountains. A sect that sends its disciples down into holes in the ground would like them to come back out again.
"A cold vein is a kind of spirit vein," she said. "The frost pools are the top of one. That’s why the water is so cold, and that’s why the moss growing on the rocks is worth anything. The vein runs under this whole ridge, and the shafts were dug to follow it."
"I know that much."
"You know what everybody knows. Here’s what they don’t know." She held up one finger. "When a cold vein gets crushed, it doesn’t just stop. All the spiritual energy that was flowing through it has nowhere to go. So it stays trapped in the broken rock for years, packing itself tighter and tighter. In the end, it turns solid."
"Solid? Into what?"
"Frostmarrow." She said the word carefully, the way you say a word you’ve only ever read in a book. "It’s pale and looks wet. It grows in the cracks in the rock, like fat in a joint of meat. It’s pure cold spiritual energy that turned solid, because it had nowhere else to go."
Han Jiu sat very still.
"How much is it worth?"
"I have no idea what it sells for at a valley market. In the sect, they handed it out a tiny bit at a time and wrote your name in a book every time they did." She paused. "A piece the size of your thumb is worth more than your branch’s whole stipend for a year. That’s the only way I can explain it to you."
"And it grows in crushed cold veins."
"It grows in crushed cold veins that nobody has opened in sixty years," said Yun Qingshuang. "And nowhere else in the Six Valleys has one of those, because everyone else dug theirs out generations ago."
"Then why did your clan seal the shafts, instead of taking the frostmarrow for themselves?"
"I don’t know." She frowned. It was the first time he had ever seen her look truly unsure about something. "It’s a good question. And I don’t like the answer I keep coming back to."
She made him listen to three warnings before she would let him go.
"First. The cold down there will kill you, and it won’t feel like it’s killing you. It’ll just feel like being tired. If you start thinking about sitting down to rest for a minute, you’re already almost dead. Count the seconds. Don’t trust how you feel."
"How long do I have?"
"At that depth, at the third stage? A quarter of an hour. Maybe twenty minutes." She saw his face. "Yes. That’s the number. That’s why eleven men died in one winter, and nobody ever went back."
"What’s the second warning?"
"Frostmarrow burns. Not like fire. It takes the skin off your palms, and it does it before you notice, because your hands will already be numb. Wrap your hands. Wrap them twice, and use cloth you don’t need."
"And the third?"
Yun Qingshuang looked at the doorway before she answered.
"Things live in old mines," she said. "Not many. But the ones that do have been living in a spirit vein for sixty years with nothing to eat. And they hunt by sensing Qi, because there’s no light down there. There never has been."
A cold feeling crept up the back of Han Jiu’s neck. It had nothing to do with the mountain.
"So don’t cultivate," she said. "Don’t move your Qi. Don’t use it to warm yourself up, and don’t use it to make your legs stronger. Don’t do the thing every cultivator does without thinking when he gets scared. The moment you move your Qi, it’s like lighting a lamp in a room full of blind animals. Every one of them will know exactly where you are, and exactly how much you’re worth to eat."
"That’s the opposite of everything I’ve ever been taught."
"Yes," she said. "That’s why the men who died down there were all cultivators."
...
He left an hour after dark. He took a coil of rope from the moss shed, a candle stub, a fire striker, and both of his blankets, torn into strips for his hands.
He didn’t take the three spirit stones out of the inventory. There was no point. Down there, he wouldn’t be able to use them.
The northernmost shaft was the smallest one, and the farthest from the road. Han Jiu had walked past it a hundred times as a boy, without ever really looking at it. Now he stood in front of it in the dark, and he couldn’t look at anything else.
Boards. Iron bands. And in the middle, the Yun Clan’s seal, pressed into a round piece of red wax as big as his palm.
He crouched down. Slowly and carefully, he worked the wax off with the tip of his knife, keeping it in one piece. He put it in his pocket.
Then he pulled the boards away.
’Let’s go get some frostmarrow.’
He swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.
’And let’s make sure I come back out alive.’