Nobody could trace a pill.
That was the whole answer, right there. A Qi Condensing Pill was the cheapest, most ordinary thing in the cultivation world. Every clan in the Six Valleys bought them by the crate. Han Bo had eaten a hundred of them before he turned fifteen.
The Han Clan could only ever afford low-grade Qi Condensing Pills. But these would be mid-grade.
’Not all of it, though,’ he thought.
Because she still had to eat.
Those six pieces had cost him his hands and a night in the frost. If he turned all six hundred pieces into pills for himself, then the next time Yun Qingshuang started getting weaker, he would have to go back down that shaft to save her. And his hands wouldn’t survive a second trip this year.
Besides, frostmarrow was better for her than pills. It suited her spirit root.
He thought it through. Every piece he kept for her was a pill he wouldn’t get for himself.
Then he made up his mind. It wasn’t a hard choice.
’Keep three hundred pieces the way they are,’ he thought. ’Turn the rest into pills.’
[Retained: 300 × frostmarrow, unrefined.]
[Converted: 300 × frostmarrow → 15 × Qi Condensing Pill, mid grade.]
[Deposited to Rebate Inventory.]
Now there were fifteen pills floating slowly in the grey space at the back of his head, next to three hundred pale stones.
Han Jiu closed the inventory, shut his eyes, and did the maths.
A low-grade Qi Condensing Pill was worth about fifty stones. Everybody knew that, because it was the pill a clan gave a fourteen-year-old to help him get past the second stage.
A mid-grade pill was worth four low-grade ones. That made each one worth two hundred stones.
Fifteen of them were worth three thousand stones.
Then he cut that in half, because of his root. That left him with fifteen hundred stones’ worth of cultivation.
The fourth stage would cost him two hundred stones. The fifth would cost four hundred. The sixth would cost eight hundred.
That was fourteen hundred altogether. And he had fifteen hundred.
’Sixth stage,’ he thought.
Two iron bulls, above the head of a man who had shown two black bulls at his own wedding just two days ago.
But the number he needed was forty.
He lay on the floor, stared at the ceiling, and let that sink in. He had gone into a mountain. He had nearly died in there. He had been paid back a hundred times what he carried out. He had turned it into pills as cleverly as he could. And he was still going to walk up to that stele eight bulls short.
’Eight bulls should be easy. I still have plenty of days left.’
She used the first piece of frostmarrow at midday. She sat on the bed with her legs crossed and the shutters closed.
Han Jiu watched from the floor. There was nothing else in the world he wanted to look at.
It wasn’t like the spirit stone. The stone had drained away in four seconds and made her a little steadier. This was slower, and it wasn’t gentle. The frostmarrow went pale in her hand, and then it went clear. Something came off it that made the air in the storeroom taste like the inside of the mine.
Her breath came out white. Frost crept up the blanket around her knees and then stopped.
She made a small sound. Her shoulders dropped, and they stayed down.
When she opened her eyes, the grey shadows under them were gone.
Completely gone. Her face was still thin, and her mouth was still pressed tight the way it always was. But the last two years had disappeared from her face. Now she looked like what she really was, a nineteen-year-old woman.
She let out a long breath. Then she looked surprised.
"Oh."
"What?"
She didn’t answer right away. She turned her hand over and looked at it, the same way she had on the first night, when she told him how much she cost.
Her hand wasn’t shaking.
"It’s stopped," she said.
"What has?"
"The falling." Her voice sounded strange. "For two years, my spirit root has been pulling at me every hour of every day, eating away my cultivation. I got so used to it that I stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a noise. And now it’s stopped."
She looked up at him.
"Han Jiu, I’m still at the seventh stage. I haven’t gained anything. I’m exactly where I was yesterday." She swallowed. "But I’m not going to be at the fifth stage by winter."
"Good." He smiled.
Then he added, "There’s more."
Yun Qingshuang blinked.
"More what?"
"More frostmarrow. A lot more." He looked at the ceiling, because that was easier than looking at her. "I can’t tell you where it is. I can’t tell you how I got it, and I can’t tell you how much there is. I know exactly how that sounds."
"It sounds like a man who stole something."
"Yes."
"From my clan."
"Not exactly." He thought about it. "No more than the rest of it was stolen from mine."
"How much more?" she asked.
"Enough that you won’t get weaker again," said Han Jiu. "Not this winter, and not next winter either. That’s all I can tell you."
"And what do you want in return?"
"I already told you. Nothing." He moved, and his hands screamed in pain, but he kept his voice steady. "I need you to get stronger. That’s it. That’s all of it. Not just fed. Not just comfortable. Stronger. Because I need you, and you’re going to need me."
Yun Qingshuang sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap. She looked down at the broken man lying on her floor.
"You do realise," she said, "that everything you just said is exactly what a person says right before they do something terrible?"
"I know."
"Sect elders talk like that. Right before they tell you your funding has been given to someone else."
"I know."
"And you still won’t tell me."
"Not yet."
She stood up, walked across the room, and picked up her sword from where it leaned by the door. Han Jiu’s stomach dropped.
Then she carried it back, sat down on the bed, and laid it across her knees, the way she always did.
"Then we’re going to have a problem one day," she said. "But not today. Today, you’re lying on the floor and you can’t close your hands. And I have three weeks of not dying that I didn’t have yesterday morning."
She looked at the shuttered window.
"Twenty-eight days," she said. "Get some sleep. When you wake up, we’re going to work out how a man with no hands can show forty bulls at a stele. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I carried you down that hill, and I have exactly one idea that might help you."