Chapter 1007 — Bitter Wind Gorge

CHAPTER 1007

Bitter Wind Gorge

An hour after Qin Wuyan left, the sky over Bitter Wind Gorge turned red.

A Helian scout came down off the east wall so fast he fell the last ten steps. He picked himself up in the courtyard, white-faced, and shouted it to the whole Hold.

“The herb village! The gorge village is burning! There’s a man in grey on the bridge, and six more with him!”

Helian Ba was already running for his axe.

Shi Feng stood in the guest house door and looked east. The Profound Heaven pressure still sat over the caravan road, far off and heavy, and Qin Wuyan was somewhere under it. Twenty li further north, the red glow over the gorge was getting brighter.

Shi Feng understood the trap and was furious. The Profound Heaven pressure had drawn Qin Wuyan away. Now a village was burning to force Shi Feng out after him. He couldn’t ignore the fire, even knowing why it had been set.

Helian Tieshan came striding across the courtyard and stopped in front of him.

“Master Shi,” Helian Tieshan said, his beard bristling. “Your guardian told you to stay inside the walls. The whole clan heard him. If you go out there and die, the Helian lose all their face.”

“If I stay inside, the village dies,” Shi Feng said. “And tomorrow the man in grey comes to your walls anyway, because I’m behind them. I’d rather meet him while there are still people in that village to save.”

Helian Tieshan looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned and roared at his warriors to saddle the sledges.

Bitter Wind Gorge was a crack in the mountains a hundred paces wide and four hundred deep, with a river of white water at the bottom. The Helian herb village stood on a shelf of rock on the far side, thirty houses and the drying sheds where the clan cured its roots. The only way across was a stone bridge, narrow enough that two men couldn’t pass on it without turning sideways. The wind came down the gorge so hard it pushed men off their feet.

The drying sheds were burning. On the cliff paths above the village, a line of small figures was climbing away from the fire.

On the bridge stood six men in grey, spread across it in pairs. Shattering Void takers, every one of them.

“Mine!” Helian Ba roared, and jumped off the sledge with the axe in both hands.

He hit the first pair at a run. The Void-Splitting Axe came down in one great stroke, and where it fell, the air itself split along the line of the edge. The taker in front tried to step back through a rift. The axe cut the rift in half before he could finish stepping, and the man fell out of the air onto the bridge with his arm hanging.

“Go!” Helian Ba shouted over his shoulder. “I’ve got the bridge! Get the one in charge!”

Shi Feng took Void-Crossing Step.

He stood on the near side of the gorge. Then he stood on the rock shelf on the far side, in the smoke, between the burning sheds and the last houses.

A man was waiting for him there.

He was tall and very thin, with a long grey face and grey hands. He wore a grey robe, and his right hand was black from the fingertips to the wrist.

“The Heavenly Sect’s Eighteenth Elder,” Huyan Moran said in a soft, dry voice. “Huyan Moran. The Nineteenth said you were quick. The Nineteenth is dead, so I suppose he was right.”

His aura settled over the shelf. Late Shattering Void, the same stage as Shi Feng’s own, and there were at least a hundred more years of cultivation behind it.

“Where are the people from these houses?” Shi Feng asked.

“Climbing,” Huyan Moran said, and nodded at the cliff paths. “Let them climb. They’re not why I came.”

He struck.

The black palm came at Shi Feng’s chest across eight paces of empty air. Shi Feng slid aside on Riverless Step, and the palm went past him and hit nothing.

But where it had passed, a black line hung in the air. It was thin, the length of a forearm, and it didn’t fade. A burning beam fell off the nearest shed and brushed the end of it. Where it touched, the beam turned grey and fell apart into dust before it reached the ground.

A seam of torn space. The same thing that had been rotting Helian Dun from the inside.

“Rot-Seam Palm,” Huyan Moran said. “Now you know why your clan friend’s uncle wouldn’t heal.”

He struck again, and again. Each palm missed, and each one left another black seam standing in the air behind it. Within ten breaths there were seven of them hanging over the shelf, and the smoke turned grey wherever it drifted through them.

Shi Feng cut back.

Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection cut space as easily as it cut flesh. The red line went across the shelf at Huyan Moran’s neck, and on its way it crossed one of the hanging seams.

The seam split.

It didn’t close. It broke into two seams, and both of them started to grow.

Shi Feng cut again, lower, and the cut crossed two more seams. Now there were four where there had been two. Every cut through a seam made it spread. Shi Feng stopped after confirming the result. More force wouldn’t help; he needed to remove what kept the tears open.

Huyan Moran smiled for the first time.

“Every cut you make, you make my net bigger,” Huyan Moran said softly. “Go on. Keep cutting.”

Shi Feng stood still on the shelf. There were nineteen black seams hanging in the air around him now. Wherever he moved, he’d brush one. Wherever he cut, he’d make more.

He lowered the grey Sword.