Chapter 1008 — A Full Stomach

CHAPTER 1008

A Full Stomach

“Giving up?” Huyan Moran asked.

“No,” Shi Feng said. “I’m thinking.”

Behind him, across the gorge, he could hear Helian Ba roaring on the bridge and the clash of the axe. On the cliff paths above, the villagers had stopped climbing to look down. Smoke rolled across the shelf through the black seams and came out grey on the other side.

Shi Feng thought through the art while watching Huyan Moran’s palm. The seams rotted whatever they touched, and his sword made more of them. So he couldn’t cut his way out. But a seam wasn’t a solid thing. It was a tear in space, held open by the rot inside it. The rot was qi. Grey, foul, dead qi, but qi all the same.

His physique could devour that qi. Shi Feng knew it would hurt afterwards, but he’d chosen how to break the art. He wouldn’t let the palm’s appearance frighten him into waiting.

Huyan Moran struck again. The black palm came straight at his chest.

Shi Feng didn’t dodge.

He stepped into it.

The palm hit him over the heart. He felt the seam open inside him, a thin cold line from his breastbone to his ribs, and the rot came pouring into his flesh. It was colder than ice and it tasted of old graves. For one breath his chest went grey under the robe.

Then the All-Devouring Physique woke up and ate it.

The rot went down into him and broke apart. Dead qi was still qi, and his body tore it open, swallowed it and sent it down into his meridians the same as any other meal. With the rot gone, the seam had nothing left to hold it open. It closed by itself. His chest was pink again before Huyan Moran had pulled his hand back.

Huyan Moran didn’t pull his hand back.

He stood there with his palm on Shi Feng’s chest, staring at it. It was the first time in his life his palm had done nothing.

“That’s not…” Huyan Moran said. “That’s not possible. Nobody…”

He was standing at arm’s length. His palm was still out, and his guard was open from the shoulder to the hip.

Shi Feng cut.

Huyan Moran saw it coming at the last instant and tore a rift behind himself. He fell backwards through it and came out on the stone bridge, twenty paces away, among his own takers. Shi Feng took Void-Crossing Step after him and landed on the bridge at his back.

The wind howled down the gorge. Below them, four hundred paces down, the white river roared.

Huyan Moran turned, raising the black palm.

Sunset-Splitting Sword took his head before the palm came up.

The head went over the side of the bridge and fell for a long time. The body stood for a breath and then dropped onto the stones. Every black seam hanging over the shelf behind them shivered, and faded, and was gone.

The two takers still standing on the bridge looked at their Elder’s body. Then they looked at Helian Ba with his bloody axe on one side and Shi Feng on the other, and they threw themselves off the bridge into rifts and didn’t come back.

There was a silence. Then the cliff above the village erupted.

“His head’s in the river! The Eighteenth’s head is in the river!”

“He let the palm hit him! I saw it! He walked into it!”

“Late Shattering Void against a bandit chief with a hundred years on him, and he took his head on the bridge!”

“Shi Feng! Shi Feng!”

The Helian warriors on the near cliff took it up. Then the villagers on the cliff paths. In the end the whole gorge was chanting it, over the wind and the river, and Helian Ba stood on the bridge with his axe over his shoulder and laughed until he had to hold onto the rail.

“Master Shi!” Helian Ba shouted. “How do you feel?”

Shi Feng put a hand on his stomach.

“Full,” Shi Feng said.

The fire in the village was out by midnight. Sixty-three people had climbed the cliff paths. Nine hadn’t. The Helian carried the nine down and laid them in the clan’s granary, and the living crowded into the house next to it, and Shi Feng spent the night on the granary floor, curled on his side with both arms round his middle.

Dead qi was still qi. But it was dead, and his stomach knew it. It cramped and burned and turned over every time he moved. It would last a week. He’d learned that the hard way, the first time he’d eaten refining metal.

Helian Ba came in at some point with a bowl of congee and set it down beside him.

“You should eat,” Helian Ba said.

“Ba,” Shi Feng said, without opening his eyes. “If you put that any closer, I’ll throw up on your boots.”

Helian Ba took the congee away.

Near dawn the door opened. Qin Wuyan came in out of the snow and stood over him.

The old guardian’s right sleeve was torn from the cuff to the elbow. There was no blood on it, and nothing else about him had changed. Shi Feng had never seen even a thread out of place on him since they met. The torn sleeve showed the old guardian hadn’t returned easily.

“You left the walls,” Qin Wuyan said.

“They were burning the village to draw me out,” Shi Feng said. “I knew it was a trap. I still couldn’t leave the villagers there.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing for a while. Then he looked down at his own torn sleeve.

“One of the first ten,” Qin Wuyan said. “He did not fight. He wanted this one away.”