Chapter 1025 — The Far Shore

CHAPTER 1025

The Far Shore

The third sky came down as lightning.

It didn’t fall from the cloud. The black cloud folded itself first, the way the lake had, and the lightning came out of the folds. One bolt came from straight above. The next came from a fold in the air beside his right ear. The third came up out of the ice under his feet.

Crack!

Shi Feng took the first one on his shoulders and the second on his arm. The third threw him ten paces across the ice and left him on his back with his hair smoking.

Shi Feng struggled upright, angry at the numbness in his legs. He planted his feet before the next bolt came.

Tribulation lightning at peak Shattering Void was the sky testing whether a man could hold space together inside himself. It came from every direction because space had every direction. There was no point dodging it. He set his feet on the ice, opened his sea of qi, and let the fourth bolt come.

On the south shore, the Helian warriors had stopped counting.

“It’s coming out of nowhere!”

“Out of the air! Look, out of the air beside him!”

“How many is that? Somebody count!”

“Seven,” the boy said hoarsely. “That’s seven.”

Shen Yaoqing wasn’t watching the lightning. She was looking past it, at the north shore, three li away across the white ice. Her hand had gone to her sword hilt.

“Senior Qin,” Shen Yaoqing said, very quietly. “The far shore. There’s a man.”

Qin Wuyan had already seen him.

On the north shore, at the edge of the black reeds, stood a man in grey sleeves. He was too far off for a face. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, perfectly still, and he was watching the ice.

“Who is it?” Helian Ba asked, gripping his axe. “Another Elder? Senior Qin! Do something!”

“He is below the line,” Qin Wuyan said. “He has not lifted a hand.”

“And if he does?” Shen Yaoqing asked.

“He will not,” Qin Wuyan said.

He didn’t move from his place in the reeds. His eyes went once to the far shore, and then back up to the cloud, where nothing was standing.

Out on the ice, Shi Feng felt the man, too.

He didn’t look. He couldn’t afford to look. The eleventh bolt had come out of a fold behind his back, and it went through his ribs and down into his legs, and for a moment he couldn’t feel his feet. The twelfth came from above. The lightning wasn’t getting stronger, but it was getting closer together, and his body was starting to fail to hold it.

Shi Feng made his choice. He couldn’t endure the remaining bolts with his meridians alone, so he let the next strike reach his physique.

The thirteenth bolt went through the fold and into him, and he let it go deeper than his body could carry. Below his sea of qi, the All-Devouring Physique opened. What his meridians couldn’t take, it swallowed. What his bones couldn’t take, it swallowed. Lightning went into him and didn’t come out.

The fourteenth did the same. The fifteenth.

On the shore, nobody understood what they were seeing.

“It’s going into him!”

“Why isn’t he burning? Why isn’t he burning?”

“He’s eating it,” a Helian warrior said slowly. “Ancestors help me, it looks like he’s eating it.”

The last bolt came out of the ice under him, thick as a man’s arm, and went straight up through him into the cloud.

The cloud broke.

It didn’t drift away. It broke into a thousand pieces at once, and pale daylight fell through the gaps onto the ice. The wind came back. Out in the middle of the lake, a man in a ruined grey robe stood very still in a ring of blackened ice, steaming.

His sea of qi had settled. It was deeper than before. The space inside him was steadier than before, a little harder to bend, and every rift he had ever torn was clearer in his mind.

Peak Shattering Void.

Relief filled Shi Feng as he checked his new realm. His injuries still hurt, but the breakthrough was complete. He finally lowered his sword.

On the south shore, it was very quiet. Then Helian Ba threw his axe in the air and caught it.

“Peak!” Helian Ba roared. “He’s at peak! Ha! He came here at late and he’s walking off at peak!”

“He’s twenty-three,” one of the Serene Jade disciples said faintly. “The Tianji list says he’s twenty-three.”

“Peak Shattering Void at twenty-three,” another disciple said. “Our chief disciple’s master needed sixty years for that.”

Shen Yaoqing didn’t answer them. She was looking at the north shore again.

“He’s gone,” Shen Yaoqing said.

Shi Feng turned.

The north shore was empty. The black reeds stood in the wind, and nobody stood among them. There were no footprints on the ice and no rift in the air. The man had been there for the whole tribulation, and now he wasn’t.

“Someone untie that boy,” Shi Feng called across the ice, noticing the cord still cutting into his wrists. “His hands have been tied all afternoon.”

Helian Ba laughed and cut the cord with his thumbnail. The boy stood up and promptly sat down again.

Then Shi Feng crossed the lake.

He went slowly, because his leg had opened again and his back was raw. He crossed three li of broken ice to the north shore, to the place where the man had stood, and stopped at the edge of the reeds.

There was something lying on the ice.

It was a thin bamboo stick, a little longer than his hand. Five red fruits were threaded on it, each one glazed in hard, clear sugar that had frozen in the cold.

A stick of candied hawthorn.