Chapter 1024 — Rift Rain

CHAPTER 1024

Rift Rain

The clouds came down out of a clear sky and stopped a hundred feet above the ice.

They weren’t storm clouds. They were grey and very flat, and they covered the whole lake from shore to shore, so low that the black hills around the bowl disappeared into them. The wind died. The cracked ice under Shi Feng stopped creaking.

On the south shore, Helian Ba set the boy down in the reeds and stared up.

“That’s not weather,” Helian Ba said.

“It’s his tribulation,” Shen Yaoqing said, watching the cloud. “Peak Shattering Void. Three skies, one after another. Everyone gets three skies, and everyone gets different ones.”

“He just killed an Elder!” Helian Ba said. “He’s bleeding all over the lake! Can’t heaven wait a day?”

“Heaven does not wait,” Qin Wuyan said.

It was the first thing he’d said since they reached the lake.

Shi Feng sat cross-legged, sword across his knees. He’d chosen to take the waste pill here. Its qi forced his breakthrough, and he was ready for the tribulation.

His injured leg worried him. He tied a sleeve strip around his thigh.

The first sky opened.

It didn’t thunder. It rained, and every drop was a cut of torn space as thin as a hair and as long as a finger. They came down by the thousands, and where they hit the ice they went through it without a sound and left a black line behind.

They hit him too.

Shi Feng pulled his outer robe up over his shoulders and bowed his head, and let them land on his back.

Each cut went through the cloth and through the skin, and stopped. Under the skin, under the muscle, his bones were gold. Nobody could see it. The robe was dark grey and soaked with blood already, and the cuts were too thin for anyone on the shore to see what they hit. To the shore it looked as if a wounded man was sitting in a rain of knives and refusing to fall over.

The onlookers couldn’t see what protected him.

“One,” the boy said on the shore. He was still sitting in the reeds with his wrists tied. “Two. Three, four. Five.”

Nobody told him to stop. After a moment one of the Helian warriors joined in. Then another.

“Thirty! Thirty-one!”

“You can’t count them all, there are too many!”

“Then count louder!”

The Rift Rain fell for the time it takes to drink a pot of tea. The boy counted the strikes he could see, which was only the ones that hit the ice around Shi Feng, and the shore counted with him. They reached two thousand and six hundred before the rain thinned and stopped.

Shi Feng lifted his head. His back stung from his shoulders to his waist, where a few thousand cuts had stopped at the bone. The bones were fine.

“Two thousand six hundred and four,” the boy said, and coughed.

“That’s the first sky,” Shen Yaoqing said quietly. “He sat through it.”

“Is that good?” Helian Ba asked.

“Most men run,” Shen Yaoqing said.

The second sky didn’t rain.

The lake began to fold.

It started at the shores. The ice along the north edge lifted, slowly, in one piece. It rose until it stood upright against the grey cloud, and then it began to bend over toward the middle of the lake, toward him. The east shore did the same. Then the west. The whole lake was closing on him from three sides, three li of ice folding inward at the speed of a walking man.

On the south shore the reeds bent toward the water, and the Helian warriors stepped back without meaning to.

“Brother Shi!” Helian Ba bellowed. “Move! It’s going to close on you!”

Shi Feng didn’t move.

He could have crossed out of it. Void-Crossing Step was at Major Success, and the fold was slow. He could have cut the nearest edge, or run south on the melt as he’d done before.

He didn’t, because of an alley in Luoxia.

A man had taken him out of that alley without a sound, and from inside, there had been nothing but sky. That man folded space for a living. Somewhere in the north he was waiting, and sooner or later Shi Feng would have to stand inside one of his folds again. Here was heaven itself, building a fold in front of him slowly, layer by layer, with every step showing.

Shi Feng thought, I need to understand this before I face that man again.

He stayed seated and studied the closing fold.

The edges closed first. Each layer of ice locked over the last. Shi Feng carefully watched the light change as the space shrank. The fold didn’t press on him. It just made less room. The north wall came within thirty paces, then twenty. The east wall overlapped it and sealed.

“He’s just sitting there!” one of the patrol disciples cried. “Why isn’t he doing anything?”

“Maybe he can’t,” another said.

“He can,” Qin Wuyan said. “He is reading.”

At ten paces, Shi Feng saw something he couldn’t name yet. The fold sealed everywhere except one place, high up, where the walls leaned together. There was a gap there. It was very thin, and it didn’t close. He looked at it for as long as he dared, and fixed it in his memory.

Then he stood up, drew the grey Sword, and cut the fold open from the inside along the line where the east wall had sealed.

It was slow, hard work, and it took everything the waste pill had given him. When the ice fell away on both sides, the shore was cheering, and he was standing in a ring of broken white blocks with his robe in rags.

Above him, the cloud had turned black.