Chapter 28: The Autumn Cauldron Trials Open Beneath Nine Roofs, Ye Xuan Mocks a Poor Scholar, and the First Round Tests a Thousand Herbs

The Grand Furnace Plaza of the Imperial Alchemy Guild held three hundred and twelve contestants, and every one of them was trying not to look nervous.

They stood in neat rows across a courtyard of white jade, each behind a long bronze table, with the nine colored roofs of the Nine-Cauldron Hall rising above them like the tiers of a giant lantern. Banners snapped from every eave. On the highest terrace, a line of Guild elders in green-and-gold robes sat motionless behind a screen of silk.

Adam stood at the back of the fourth row in his gray cloak, with his hood drawn forward and his hands tucked into his sleeves. The registration token on his belt read HAN WEN, UNLICENSED, SOUTHERN CONTINENT.

The man next to him leaned over. "Eight years I’ve been entering this," he whispered. "They say if the Ye boy doesn’t win, they re-run the contest."

"Is that so," Adam said.

A ripple went through the crowd.

The nearest rows parted as a procession came across the plaza. Six attendants in black walked in a wedge, and at their head, with his hands behind his back and a smile that never quite reached his eyes, came a young man in a black robe edged in gold.

He was tall and handsome in a lazy, arrogant way, with a gold-ringed crow pin at his throat and a Golden Core pressure that rolled across the courtyard like warm water. His hair was bound in a jade crown. He nodded to the elders’ screen with exactly as much respect as he wished to show.

Ye Xuan.

Adam studied him with an expression of mild, polite curiosity. Beneath it, a cold hand closed slowly around his chest.

The young man had Ye’s cheekbones and Ye’s mouth. He had the same easy confidence of someone who had never lost anything he wanted, and he walked through the plaza as if the whole Imperial City were a room built for him.

He stopped three paces from Adam.

"A new face," Ye Xuan said.

Adam bowed from the waist. "Han Wen, Master Ye. A traveling scholar."

"A scholar. How refreshing." The Golden Core pressure flickered over Adam, probing, and slid off the veiled cloak like rain off glass. "Third layer of Qi Condensation? And you’ve paid a hundred stones to compete in the Autumn Cauldron Trials?"

"It seemed a good use of savings."

A ripple of laughter went through Ye Xuan’s attendants. Ye Xuan smiled, too, and then the smile cooled.

"Where do you come from, Scholar Han?"

"The Southern Continent."

"Ah." He tilted his head. "My cousin died there last month. Very sad. Killed by a gutter-born dog named Adam Hale." His eyes were bright and pleasant and very watchful. "You wouldn’t have heard of him on your way north."

The courtyard seemed to shrink to the space between them.

Adam let his shoulders sag, and he gave a small, rueful, slightly embarrassed shrug.

"I heard the name on the road, Master Ye. Everyone had. They say there’s a hundred thousand stones on his head."

"A hundred thousand." Ye Xuan laughed softly. "The Ancestor values him very high, for a Foundation Establishment mongrel." He turned, and the black robe swirled. "Do try not to embarrass yourself, Scholar Han. The first round is herbs, and herbs are hard on people who read too many books."

He walked on. His attendants followed, and a pale, gold-thread breeze rippled out behind them.

Adam watched him go.

’Hundred thousand,’ he thought. ’A gutter-born dog.’ He allowed himself one slow breath. ’I will remember that.’

A gong sounded.

The first round was called Herb-Sight. Before each contestant stood a tray of two hundred sealed jade boxes, each holding a single spirit herb. They had one hour to open every box, name the herb, assign its grade, and write the correct use on a slip of silk. The most accurate hundred would advance.

Adam opened the first box.

The moment the lid lifted, the Eyes of Divine Insight did the rest. The herb unfolded in his sight like an open book: Moonlit Jade Orchid, Seven-Year, High Grade. Cools the dantian, used in Foundation Pills. He wrote it down in a clean, small, unremarkable hand.

The second. The third. A Frost-Bite Lotus, an ancient-root Black Ginseng, a withered stem of Thunder-Heart Vine that he was fairly sure the Guild had never seen alive. Two hundred herbs, and every one of them told him its name.

He reached the hundredth box in eleven minutes and put down his brush.

’Perfect,’ he thought. ’And exactly what I mustn’t be.’

A man who scored perfectly in a contest the Ye clan watched would be a man the Ye clan studied. A man who scored middling, who made a few honest mistakes and squeaked into the top hundred, would be a dull scholar with a lucky eye.

He went back to the beginning. He changed the grade on the thirty-first herb from High to Mid. He misnamed the ninetieth as Crimson Fern, and the hundred and fifty-second as a cousin of the real thing. Nine small errors, scattered like stones. Every one was wrong in a way that a skilled alchemist would find plausible.

At the hour, the gong rang again.

The silk slips were collected and carried up to the terrace. For a long time, nothing happened. Then the elders’ screen drew back, and a clerk’s voice carried across the plaza, reading the names in order.

"First place, Ye Xuan of the Gilded-Crow. Two hundred of two hundred."

A roar went up from the black-robed attendants. Ye Xuan did not so much as turn his head.

The list went on. Adam waited, his hands in his sleeves, until a name he’d been hoping not to hear came near the middle.

"Forty-seventh, Han Wen, Southern Continent. One hundred and ninety-one of two hundred."

He bowed to the clerk. He felt, at his back, a pair of sharp green eyes.

Su Lian stood at the foot of the elders’ terrace, her arms folded, a silk slip pinched between two fingers. She held it up and tilted it, as though she were reading a joke, and her eyes met Adam’s across the plaza.

She mouthed a single word. He could read it clearly.

Liar.

Adam smiled, very slightly, and turned back toward the crowd.