The Heretical Path of Occult Immortal novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Frost Bell

In the dark of the Insect House he eats a second gu and goes cold; at dawn his blood cures a dying Medicine Brother before the whole Hall.

The next gu came in a clay jar the size of a rice bowl.

Pei Ruo carried it into the north room with a pair of tongs.

"Frost Bell," she said. "A pale beetle with a bell-shaped back. In a quiet room you can hear it ring."

Cen Yu could hear it. It was a thin, high note, and it did not stop.

The north room had one shutter, and it faced a blank wall, as she had promised.

He took off his smock and lay down on the packed-earth floor, on his back, with his hands folded over his stomach.

"You don't have to watch," he said.

"I weigh what comes out. I have to be here."

She sat down on a stool with her ledger on her knee, and tipped the beetle into his open mouth with the tongs.

It was cold going down. It was colder than the Black Ancestor had been, and the cold spread outward from his stomach until his teeth hurt.

His body wanted to shiver and curl around the cold. He kept it flat.

Count, he told himself. One breath. Two breaths. One hundred.

It was the only thing he had ever been good at.

He had never told anyone, because nobody asked what a poor man's son was good at.

His father had taught him the first piece of it, in the tea fields, with a bee sting on his arm.

Do not slap it. It will only swell.

Cen Yu had not understood why a sting swelled less if you did nothing, until the first gu.

A gu was a guest that ate, and it ate the same whether or not you fought it.

Everyone who fought it died of the fight.

Somewhere in the night Pei Ruo stopped writing and just watched his chest.

She did not speak, and he was grateful.

At the grey end of the night, the pain went out and the ringing stopped.

He spat the husk into his hand. It was small and white and brittle, and it had a faint bluish frost on it.

He ate it in one swallow, with her watching.

She wrote something down, and it was not a weight.

"Does it taste of anything?" she said, not looking up.

"No."

"Not since the Black Ancestor?"

He stared at her. "How do you know that?"

"You ate it, and I weigh what the Hall loses," she said. "Everything costs something."

She stood and held out her hand to help him up.

He took it, and she flinched and let go.

"You are cold as the well," she said.

His fingers were white to the second knuckle. The skin had no heat in it at all.

He tried to flex them, and they moved, but slowly.

That was the second thing the gu had taken, and he had not even felt it go.

A bell began to ring across the courtyard, hard and fast.

It was not the dawn bell. It was the bell for the sick.

They ran out together, Cen Yu stumbling, Pei Ruo in front.

In the middle of the courtyard a crowd of Medicine Brothers had formed a ring.

On the ground inside it lay a young brother with blue lips and frost on his eyelashes.

His whole body was shaking.

His breath came out in short white puffs, though nobody else's showed in the air.

"Frost Bell," said someone. "He crushed a dead one for the pill powder, and it was not dead."

"The antidote needs a week to brew," said someone else.

"He doesn't have a week. He doesn't have an hour."

The Elder came through the crowd with his sleeves flapping, and knelt, and put one warm hand on the boy's chest.

For a moment his face did not look gentle at all.

"It is in his heart," the Elder said. "Get the brewers. Get anything."

Pei Ruo's hand closed on Cen Yu's cold sleeve.

"He is dying of what you just ate," she said, very low, and her voice was shaking. "Try your blood."

"Try what?"

"Do you have anything to lose? A cut?"

He looked at the boy on the ground.

He had never tried it. He had never had a reason to think it would work.

But he had just eaten the thing that was killing this man, whole and dead.

His body had not been sick for a moment.

It had taken the poison in and kept something back.

He pushed through the ring.

"Move," he said, to the nearest brother, and the brother moved, from sheer surprise.

He knelt in the frost, and drew the bowl-knife from his sash, and cut the heel of his own palm.

His blood came slowly, and it was dark.

He held his hand over the boy's blue mouth and let three drops fall on his tongue.

For one breath nothing happened.

Then the boy gasped, and the blue drained out of his lips.

He coughed once and opened his eyes.

His breath stopped showing in the air.

Forty Medicine Brothers stood absolutely still.

Cen Yu wrapped his palm in his sleeve and stood up. His knees were shaking.

At the back of the ring, in the doorway of the clerk's office, stood Shen Ao.

His face was very pale.

"You never told me you could do that," he said.

Cen Yu opened his mouth.

Before he could answer, the Elder rose from the ground and wiped his hand on his robe.

For the first time that morning he was smiling.

"A Kept Vessel with his own antidote," said the Elder softly. "The Hall has never had one."

He took Cen Yu's cut hand in both of his, and it was so warm that Cen Yu nearly cried out.

"The bleeding day is the thirtieth," the Elder said. "From now on, it is the thirtieth and the fifteenth."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend