Chapter 1032 — The Third Anvil

CHAPTER 1032

The Third Anvil

The plateau was gone, and the sky had taken its place.

Shi Feng stood on nothing. Above him, below him and on every side lay a black sky full of cold stars, close and perfectly silent. He had seen this sky once before, in a wet alley in Luoxia, with the smell of burnt sugar still in the air.

Fifty paces ahead, Rong Tianshou sat on his rock again. The rock had come in with him. Nothing else had.

“It’s the same, isn’t it?” Rong Tianshou asked, folding his grey sleeves in his lap. “People always tell me so. Nobody forgets the first time.”

“Last time, I didn’t know what I was looking at,” Shi Feng said, and flexed his fingers on the grey Sword.

“And this time?” Rong Tianshou asked.

“This time I’m looking,” Shi Feng said.

He turned his back on the rock and walked away. Ten steps. Twenty. On the twentieth step the rock was in front of him again, fifty paces off, and Rong Tianshou hadn’t moved at all.

“Every road in here leads back to me,” Rong Tianshou said kindly. “That’s the whole art. The Hollow Sky Fold doesn’t hold a man. It just gives him nowhere else to go.”

Shi Feng stopped walking.

At the 6 Mark sitting, he had held nine folds of space apart inside one cauldron for most of an afternoon. He knew what a fold was from the inside. Space didn’t fold by itself. Wherever it was bent shut, it had to be pinned, and the pinned line was always firmer than the rest. Spirit Sense found nothing here, the same as at Luoxia. But his feet weren’t Spirit Sense. He pressed down with a thread of qi through his soles and felt for the firm line.

There. Under his left heel, thin and straight, ran a ridge of space a little harder than the nothing around it.

Void-Crossing Step at Major Success could put him anywhere space was solid enough to stand on. Shi Feng stepped onto the ridge and stood.

For the first time, he wasn’t falling back toward the rock.

Rong Tianshou’s eyebrows rose. He looked pleased.

“You found the stitching,” Rong Tianshou said. “Most people scream for a day before they think of their feet. You’ve made pots.”

“Cauldrons,” Shi Feng said.

“To a man like me, it’s the same thing,” Rong Tianshou said, and stood up.

Shi Feng ran the seam. It curved away to the right and climbed, and he followed it until he was level with the rock and ten paces to its side. Then he came off the seam already cutting. Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection opened the air in one long red line toward Rong Tianshou’s neck.

Rong Tianshou lifted one grey sleeve.

“Returning Sleeve,” Rong Tianshou said.

The cut went into the sleeve and didn’t come out of it. It came out behind Shi Feng instead. His own sword stroke opened his left side from the lowest rib to the hip, and he felt the edge he’d sharpened himself go into his own body.

Shi Feng stumbled back onto the seam. Blood ran down inside his robe.

“Your sword, your ribs,” Rong Tianshou said mildly. “I only hold the door. Do you know how long I’ve folded space, Master Shi? Three hundred and eleven years. You’ve been at it for two.”

Shi Feng admitted the difference in skill. Rong Tianshou had spent centuries studying spatial arts. Trying to beat him with the same methods would only waste qi.

Shi Feng lowered his sword and changed his approach.

He came in again along a lower seam, close and fast, sword low. Rong Tianshou didn’t bother with the sleeve this time. He stepped, and space bent with the step, and his palm came out of the air beside Shi Feng’s left arm instead of in front of him.

Crack!

The forearm broke cleanly below the elbow. The grey Sword nearly fell from Shi Feng’s right hand with the shock.

Rong Tianshou’s other palm was already coming for his chest.

Nobody could see into this place. Not the Helian on the plateau’s edge, not the Serene Jade patrol, not Qin Wuyan up in the clouds and not whatever stood above Qin Wuyan. In here there was only Rong Tianshou, and Rong Tianshou wasn’t going to leave.

Shi Feng let the gold come up in his bones.

The palm hit his ribs hard enough to break a fortress gate. Under his robe the ribs held, and the blow stopped dead against them. The force went back up Rong Tianshou’s arm instead.

Rong Tianshou took one step back and looked at his own palm. For the first time, his kind face was serious.

“Your bones are hard,” Rong Tianshou said slowly. “Harder than peak Shattering Void has any right to be.”

Shi Feng said nothing. He was already pouring qi into the Thousand Forge Flame.

The Second Anvil Fire ran nine beats and a rest. He’d used it on chains and wards and links of iron, because it heated things. A fold wasn’t a thing. Heat that only warmed metal would never touch it. The old manual had a third anvil, and he had never once got the fire onto it: the Third Anvil Fire didn’t strike metal at all. It struck the fire against its own beat, again and again, until the flame was hot enough to burn what wasn’t there.

Shi Feng thought, I have to burn the fold itself. He skipped the rest after the ninth beat and forced out a tenth.

The flame in his right palm went from white to a colour with no name. Eleven. Twelve. His broken arm hung at his side, and every beat pulled qi out of him he’d need later. Fifteen. Sixteen. On the eighteenth beat the fire dropped onto the third anvil and stayed there.

The Third Anvil Fire reached Entry.

Heat went out from his hand in a ring, and the sky burned.

Where the ring touched it, the black wall of the fold blistered. Stars went brown and smoking. Flakes of scorched dark peeled off and drifted down past his feet, and for the first time in his life he saw that the sky in this place had a surface, close enough to touch.

It burned evenly everywhere, except in one place.

Straight overhead, a narrow band of sky stayed black and cold, its stars untouched. The fire didn’t scorch it, because it wasn’t the wall. It was pinned from the outside, and every fold had to keep its seam somewhere.

Rong Tianshou looked up too. Alarm replaced his pleasure. Shi Feng’s fire had exposed something his sword and Spirit Sense couldn’t find.

Shi Feng stood on the seam with blood in his boot and his arm hanging, and looked at the band of cold stars.

At Luoxia, he’d hung in this sky for many breaths and looked straight up, because there was nothing else to look at.

He had been looking at the door the whole time.