Chapter 1023 — Two Sides
CHAPTER 1023
Two Sides
With his eyes shut, the mirrors were gone.
What was left was the wind over the ice, the blood running down his leg, and his Spirit Sense spread across three li of lake. It found a hundred boys. Each mirror threw back the boy’s aura along with his face, so his Spirit Sense was no better than his eyes.
But under the wind, someone was counting.
“Two thousand and nine,” the boy whispered. “Two thousand and ten.”
The mirrors copied light and aura. They couldn’t copy a count. A count went on, one number after another, with a little breath and a little qi in each, and only one boy out of a hundred was actually breathing the numbers. The other ninety-nine moved their lips in silence.
Mei Shuo had taught them that in the Pit. If you stopped counting, you stopped being anyone.
“Two thousand and eleven,” the boy breathed.
North-north-east. Six hundred paces. Behind four mirrors.
“Master Shi has gone to sleep,” Lan Yezhi said from everywhere, amused. “That’s a first.”
Shi Feng didn’t answer her. He couldn’t step through the mirrors, because every face was a door to somewhere else. He couldn’t cross the void, because the folds would catch the step. He’d have to go around them, on the ice itself, and the ice was too smooth to run on with a bleeding leg.
Shi Feng thought of Riverless Step. He didn’t need firm ground if he could melt a path through the ice.
He struck the Second Anvil Fire down through the soles of his boots. Clang! The ice under him went white, then clear, then soft, and a thin sheet of meltwater ran out from his feet toward the north-east, steaming in the cold.
Riverless Step at Perfection walked on anything that flowed.
He ran on the melt.
He kept low and went between the mirrors, never in front of one, with fire beating ahead of him so the water kept running. The meltwater hissed under his feet, and the cold wind tore the steam off behind him in a long white line.
“He’s running on water!” a Helian warrior shouted from the shore. “The lake’s frozen and he’s running on water!”
“He’s making the water as he goes!”
“Which way is he going? There’s nothing over there but mirrors!”
“Two thousand and forty,” the boy said, very close now.
Shi Feng opened his eyes.
The mirror in front of him looked like every other mirror. In it the boy knelt with his wrists tied, and his lips moved, and this time the breath came out of them as mist. The facet wasn’t a door. It was a pocket, a small fold of space closed around a real boy so that he looked like one more picture among a hundred.
A pocket had a seam. He’d found seams in a cauldron with nine clouds over it.
He put his left hand into the edge of the mirror, found the place where the fold had been stitched shut, and tore it open.
The boy fell out onto the ice, still counting.
“Two thousand and fifty—” the boy began.
“You’re safe now,” Shi Feng said, gripping the back of his collar. “The big man with the axe will catch you. Don’t struggle.”
He threw him.
The boy went low and fast across the ice, spinning on his back with his tied hands in the air, and slid a full three hundred paces into the reeds on the south shore. Helian Ba dropped his axe, ran two steps onto the ice, and scooped him up.
“I’ve got him!” Helian Ba roared. “I’ve got him! Ha! Hahaha!”
The lake went cold.
All hundred mirrors turned at once. Every face swung round to point at Shi Feng, and they began to close in on him from every side, ring inside ring. Anything that stood in front of a face would be folded somewhere it couldn’t come back from.
“You’ve made me lose a hostage,” Lan Yezhi said, and for the first time her voice wasn’t amused. “Then I’ll fold you into the lake bed and dig you out myself.”
Shi Feng stood in the closing ring and shut his eyes again.
A hundred mirrors needed qi to stand. It came out of one place and ran out along thin threads to every facet. He followed the threads back with his Spirit Sense. They all met behind one mirror on the western side of the ring, the one place a careful woman would stand when she turned every face in one direction.
Shi Feng understood her mistake. She’d aimed every face inward at him, leaving the backs exposed to an attack from outside.
A mirror had two sides. Only the face was a fold. The back was just the back.
He went up.
Void-Crossing Step put him forty feet above the ice, outside the ring, and Falling Star Sword came down from there. It was a sword that fell along a straight line from the sky, and it didn’t need to see its target. It only needed to know where the line ended.
It ended behind the western mirror.
The grey Sword came down the back of the facet and through it. The glass split from top to bottom. Lan Yezhi was standing behind it with her sleeve still raised, and the sword went through the sleeve, the shoulder and the woman, and on into the ice.
Boom!
The lake cracked for a hundred paces. Ninety-nine mirrors went dark and fell over, and shattered on the ice. Lan Yezhi fell in two pieces beside the last one.
The watchers on shore were stunned. Lan Yezhi had seemed certain to win, but her own mirrors had hidden Shi Feng’s last attack.
“Sixteenth,” one of the Helian warriors said finally. “That’s the Sixteenth.”
“Four Elders,” another said. “He’s killed four of them.”
“Bandit chiefs,” the first one said quickly. “Bandit chiefs, I mean.”
“…”
Shi Feng sat down on the ice.
He was spent. His thigh was open to the muscle, his qi was down to the dregs, and the Second Anvil Fire had burned half of what was left. He took the jade box out of his sleeve with a hand that wasn’t quite steady and put the waste pill in his mouth.
It tasted of burnt bone. Nine hundred thousand worth of herbs went down his throat at once, and his empty sea of qi filled in three breaths, and kept filling, and pressed against the place it had been pressing for two days.
This time the place gave.
Above Mirror Ice Lake, the sky answered.