The cold came up the shaft to meet him, like it had been waiting for him.
The frost pools were cold in the simple way that water is cold. This cold was heavier. It was the cold of stone, deep inside a mountain, and there was no arguing with it.
By the time Han Jiu was forty feet down, his candle flame had shrunk to a tiny blue point. It stopped flickering completely.
He started counting the seconds.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Some of the old wooden supports were still standing. In the place where the roof had fallen in, the broken rock had wedged itself into a rough arch. Underneath it, there was a gap just wide enough for a thin man to crawl through on his stomach.
Han Jiu tried not to think about it too much, and crawled through.
At two hundred, he stood up on the other side. He was now in the part of the mountain that had already killed eleven men.
At two hundred and forty, he found the frostmarrow.
It looked exactly the way she had described it. It was pale and looked wet, and it filled a crack in the rock like fat packed into a joint of meat. The seam of it was nearly as long as his arm. When the candlelight touched it, the light seemed to sink into it and come back out softer and bluer.
Han Jiu could barely feel his hands anymore.
He wrapped the cloth around them twice, and started cutting.
By four hundred, he had cut three pieces loose. His fingers had started to ignore him.
By five hundred, he had six pieces. He couldn’t feel his face anymore either.
And somewhere in the back of his head, a warm, sensible voice started whispering to him.
’Just sit down for a moment. Rest against the rock. You can keep going afterwards.’
Then he remembered what she had said. ’If you start thinking about sitting down, you’re already almost dead.’
Han Jiu swore at the wall. The word came out slurred, and that scared him more than the cold did.
He stuffed the six pieces into his shirt and turned toward the way out.
Then something lit up in the darkness ahead of him.
Forty-eight black bulls.
They hung faintly in the pitch-black tunnel, walking in a slow circle. They didn’t light up anything around them, but Han Jiu could see them perfectly.
Forty-eight. That was forty-four more than he had.
They belonged to something. Some kind of beast.
Han Jiu froze.
He couldn’t see its body. All he could see was the number, floating in the air where the creature’s head should be.
And the number was moving toward him. Slowly, as if it had all the time in the world.
Then he heard it. It was a long, dry, scraping sound against the stone, like a heavy rope being dragged across the ground.
Every part of Han Jiu’s body was screaming at him. It wanted him to move his Qi. It wanted him to push warmth back into his blood and strength into his legs, so that he could be something more than a freezing man stuck in a hole with a knife.
He crushed that feeling down.
He stood with his back against the rock and six pieces of stolen frostmarrow pressed against his chest. He gave the creature nothing. Not a single bull. Not even a tiny wisp of Qi.
His candle was still burning in his left hand. The flame was so small and blue that it was almost invisible in the dark. He pinched it out anyway.
Now the darkness was total.
The forty-eight black bulls kept coming.
Then they stopped, eight feet away from him, at about the height of his knees.
Han Jiu stopped breathing.
The scraping sound stopped too.
Something huge and freezing cold slid past his boots. It was so close that he felt the dust move against his feet.
The forty-eight bulls moved past him. They kept going up the tunnel, toward the collapsed roof, until they were gone.
...
Han Jiu came out of the shaft an hour before dawn.
As soon as he was out in the open air, he moved his Qi.
He had held it down for so long that letting it move again felt like getting his body back.
Four black bulls appeared above his head. Warmth spread down his arms and into his chest. For about ten heartbeats, he thought he was going to be fine.
Then he noticed how little Qi he had left.
He had gone into that shaft with barely enough strength to start with, and then he had spent an hour freezing at the bottom of it. What was left wouldn’t even fill a cup. He could feel it disappearing, and he could feel exactly how fast it was going.
He put the boards back over the shaft anyway.
It took him four times longer than taking them off. His fingers wouldn’t close properly. Again and again, he had to hold the nails between his teeth to line them up.
When he was finally done, he pressed the red wax seal back into the middle of the boards. He held it there with both wrists until the cold made it stick.
"Urgh..."
The numbness was leaving his hands, and the pain that came in its place brought tears to his eyes.
"Fuck. That hurts."
He didn’t look at his hands. It was still too dark to see them properly, and he was glad.
The Yun Clan’s seal faced the mountain again, unbroken, exactly as it had been before.
Han Jiu sat down in the frozen bushes. The six pieces of frostmarrow were tucked inside his shirt. He let himself shake.
Six pieces, each one about the size of his thumb.
He swallowed the pain and made himself think about why he had come here. He didn’t know how many spirit stones the frostmarrow was worth. But he knew exactly what it had cost him.
Then he got back up on his feet, because of where he was sitting.
He was only forty feet away from a sealed Yun mine shaft. Below the ridge, a track led straight down into the valley, where twelve Yun cultivators were asleep.
A herdsman could find him here. So could a boy sent up early to fetch water. Anyone who came over that ridge and found Han Jiu lying in the frost, with his hands burned white and his shirt stuffed full of frostmarrow, could end everything before it had even started.
Elder Yun Hai wouldn’t even have to raise his voice.
Han Jiu started walking down the track.
Pain shot through his frozen legs, but he had no choice. If he didn’t walk, he would die.
He made it about two hundred steps before he realised he wasn’t going to make it much farther.
His legs were barely working. The cold was still inside him. It hadn’t stopped when he left the shaft, and now he understood why.
It was the frostmarrow.
He had six pieces of raw cold spiritual energy pressed against his chest, with only one thin layer of cloth between them and his skin. All six of them were pouring cold into him faster than his Qi could push it out.
He was carrying the thing that was killing him. He had crawled into that hole and nearly died to get it, and now it was finishing the job on the way home.
Han Jiu pushed his Qi harder. The four black bulls above his head flickered.
"No." He gritted his teeth. "Not here."
The edges of his vision started to blur.
His boot caught on a stone. He fell forward onto his hands and knees. Pain burst through his whole body, but somehow it felt far away.
"Fuck..."
He reached for his Qi.
There was nothing left. Every last drop had been used up fighting the cold, and the frostmarrow hadn’t even slowed down.
"No." His breathing was ragged now. "No. No."
For a second, everything went black.
And in that darkness, fear grabbed his heart. It was the fear of dying.
Han Jiu opened the Rebate Inventory and pulled out all three spirit stones.
"Please."
His fingers shook around them.
"I just need to get back to her."
His eyes burned.
"I just need to give her this."
He stared at the three spirit stones in his hand.
This was it. Everything he had done, everything he had risked, everything he had suffered through, had led to this moment. This was his one chance to change his fate. And hers.
His voice broke.
’This is your fucking chance to turn your life around...’
He squeezed his fists shut.
’...and one more person’s.’
He dragged himself up onto his feet.
’SO STAND THE FUCK UP!’