Chapter 28

Chapter 28: Chapter 28

Three days later, the Law Hall delivered his champion’s reward right in the middle of the Outer Valley for everyone to see.

Two clerks in black carried it out in a lacquered box: a pouch of fifty mid-grade spirit stones, a jade token granting him a place on the Misty Lotus expedition, and a scroll bearing the Sect Master’s seal that named him champion of the year’s tournament. Half the valley crowded around to watch. Ruan Tie, freshly discharged from Medicine Valley on heavily bandaged feet, stood right at the front of the crowd, grinning so hard it looked painful.

Elder Gu presented the box himself.

"A champion from the ninth level of the mines," Gu said warmly, placing the lacquered wood into Yan Shuo’s hands. "The sect is proud of you, child. You showed real courage up on that terrace." His kind eyes lingered on Yan Shuo’s healing face and the yellowing bruise around his eye. "I do regret our guest’s enthusiasm, though. Young men from great clans so easily forget their own strength."

"Thank you for your concern, Elder."

"Get some rest." Gu gave his shoulder a single, grandfatherly pat and smiled. "The secret realm opens in less than a month. You’ll want your strength back before then."

He turned and walked away through the parting crowd. Yan Shuo stood holding the box and watched his back disappear down the path.

’He means every word of that,’ Qin Wuyue said quietly. ’He wants you healthy, whole, and walking into that secret realm on your own two feet.’

’Why?’

’Because something that walks in on its own feet,’ Qin said, ’can be carried out alive.’

That afternoon, he went to the Scripture Pavilion to dust the third floor.

Wen Lingxi sat at her desk when he stepped inside, copying from a scroll in her steady hand. She didn’t look up from the paper.

"Well, if it isn’t the champion," she said dryly. "How kind of you to remember us little people."

"You mentioned the third floor needed dusting whenever an outer disciple had a free afternoon."

"So I did." Lingxi dipped her brush into the water pot and rinsed the bristles clean. "Lock the door behind you, would you? I’m really not in the mood for visitors today."

He turned the iron bolt.

By the time he faced her again, she had taken off her spectacles. She sat looking at him across the desk with her ink-stained fingers folded together, all trace of humor gone from her face.

"I watched the guest’s challenge from the back of the stands," she said, her dark eyes fixing on his. "More importantly, I watched Elder Gu argue for it. I’ve seen that man argue for a great many things over the last twenty years, Yan Shuo, and I have never once seen him lean forward in his seat."

Yan Shuo stayed quiet.

"He leaned forward for you the entire match, like he was waiting for something specific to happen," Lingxi continued. "I don’t know what he was looking for, and I’m not going to ask. Conditionally, I know Gu Hongzhan. He’s planning something for that expedition, and I refuse to let you walk into it blind."

Using the small brass key tied to her wrist, she unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and lifted out a thick, worn ledger bound in grey cloth.

"Sit down," she said. "There’s something you need to see."

He pulled up the wooden stool and sat.

She laid the ledger between them and flipped it open. The pages were cramped with figures written in a small, meticulous hand he didn’t recognize—row after row of dates, names, and numbers.

"This was my husband’s," Lingxi said, her voice dropping low. "Zhiyuan kept the sect’s treasury accounts for eleven years. Whenever an entry bothered him, he copied it into this book and hid it under the floorboards at home, where the Law Hall never thought to look." She turned the brittle pages carefully. "I told you before about the disciples who left on external missions and vanished from the rosters. That was only half of what he found."

She stopped near the back of the book and spun it around to face him.

"Here’s the rest of it."

It was a record of incoming payments. Every line listed a date, a disciple’s name, and a sum in spirit stones. The figures were staggering—far more than an outer disciple’s yearly stipend, more than the treasury spent keeping Medicine Valley running for an entire season.

At the top of the page, Elder Wen had written a single heading: Remittances received from the Ledger Pavilion. Logged as ’external mission fees.’

Yan Shuo stared at the ink for a long moment. "They were buying them."

"Every single one," Lingxi said evenly. "Every disciple with unusual meridians that the Law Hall sent north, the Ledger Pavilion paid for. A hundred mid-grade stones for some, two hundred for others. Zhiyuan found the deposits buried under false headings in the main accounts and cross-referenced the dates against the missing disciples." She tapped her fingernail against the far edge of the paper. "Look at the right-hand margin."

He shifted his gaze.

Beside each name, copied faithfully from the Ledger Pavilion’s own receipts, was a brief status note.

A few read deceased in transit.

Most simply said delivered.

But a small handful—maybe one in ten—were marked delivered alive, and the payouts beside those names were three or four times higher than the rest.

The quiet of the Scripture Pavilion seemed to press in around his ears.

"Alive," Yan Shuo murmured.

"The Pavilion pays a premium for the ones who arrive breathing," Lingxi said, holding his gaze. "Zhiyuan never figured out why. He was still digging into it when he died. I’ve gone over this page a thousand times over the last three years, Yan Shuo. I don’t know where they’re being taken, or what’s being done to them, but nobody spends hundreds of high-grade spirit stones on a corpse."

’Brat,’ Qin whispered. Her voice had gone tight and thin, as if someone had a hand clamped around her throat. ’Read the names.’

He looked back down and started from the top, tracing his way down the dead treasurer’s neat column line by line. He knew some of them. There was a boy from the kitchens who had been sent out when Yan Shuo was fifteen; a girl from the Herb Garden who walked with a limp; an outer disciple named Pan who used to split his rice rations when winter stipends ran short, and who had gone north one frost and never come back.

The dates crept further back in time as his eyes moved down the paper. Five years ago. Six.

Near the bottom of the page, his gaze caught on a line and froze.

The entry was dated the spring he turned thirteen. The payout beside it dwarfed everything else on the sheet: three hundred high-grade spirit stones, enough wealth to keep the sect’s main cultivation chambers burning for ten years straight.

Beside the sum, written in Elder Wen’s careful, steady hand, was the name—followed by the exact notation the Ledger Pavilion paid so dearly for.

While the afternoon bells tolled across the mountain outside and the widow watched him silently from across the desk, Yan Shuo read the line once, then twice, until the black characters blurred together on the grey paper:

Yan Ruxue. Herb Garden. Delivered alive.