Chapter 1033 — Bad Luck

CHAPTER 1033

Bad Luck

Rong Tianshou saw where Shi Feng was looking, and he moved first.

“Don’t,” Rong Tianshou said quietly.

The scorched fold shrank until its starry sky was no wider than a courtyard. Rong Tianshou’s grey sleeves filled with folded space. Every seam Shi Feng could feel under his feet began to bend toward the rock.

Shi Feng understood the danger. Rong Tianshou was shrinking the fold to remove every seam he could use to escape.

Shi Feng chose the rising seam. The gap overhead was still open, and he had to reach it before the fold crushed inward.

Void-Crossing Step carried him up the seam toward the cold stars in three steps. On the third, his head was level with the band. On the fourth, there was no more seam, only the band itself, pinned from outside and very thin.

He stepped through it.

Cold wind hit his face. Real wind, carrying grit and snow. Below him lay Bitter Sky Plateau, a li of grey stone and old snow, and in the middle of it hung a patch of air that didn’t match the rest. From outside, the Hollow Sky Fold looked like nothing at all, just a place where the light bent slightly wrong. Now it had a scorched brown skin, and he could see its roof.

Rong Tianshou was under that roof. Shi Feng had come out of the fold above him.

Falling Star Sword was made to come down from above.

Shi Feng turned the grey Sword point down in his right hand and dropped.

The art pulled every thread of qi he had left into the tip of the blade. At Major Success it didn’t care what it fell through. It went through the scorched roof of the fold without slowing, back into the black sky, and down onto the rock.

Rong Tianshou was looking up. He’d raised both grey sleeves, and the Returning Sleeve opened in front of him to swallow the stroke and send it back.

But the sleeve was a fold too, and the Falling Star Sword had just come through a bigger one.

Boom!

The point went into the sleeve, through it and out the other side. It split Rong Tianshou from the left shoulder to the right hip, and the rock under him cracked in two.

The Hollow Sky Fold came apart.

There was no sound. The black sky simply wasn’t there anymore. Scorched flakes of it fell out of the air over the plateau in a soft brown rain. Shi Feng hit the ground on one knee in the middle of them, and beside him Rong Tianshou sat down hard on half of his broken rock.

At the plateau’s edge, three hundred paces off, people were shouting.

“There! They’re back! Both of them!”

“Where did they come from? There was nothing there a breath ago!”

“The old one’s sitting down. Why is he sitting down?”

“Because he’s been cut in half, you fool!”

“The Fifteenth. That’s the Fifteenth, peak Shattering Void. Inside his own fold.”

“…”

Rong Tianshou looked down at himself. The cut ran straight through his grey robe and straight through him. He didn’t try to hold it shut. He looked at the brown flakes settling in his lap, and then at Shi Feng.

“The seam,” Rong Tianshou said. His voice was already thin. “You burned the wall to find the seam. Three hundred years, and nobody ever thought of setting the sky on fire.”

“Who were you looking for in the south?” Shi Feng asked.

Rong Tianshou smiled at him. It was the same kind smile from the start of the day.

“Bad luck,” Rong Tianshou said. “Both of ours.”

Rong Tianshou’s smile stopped moving. Shi Feng watched until he was certain the man was dead. The answer about the south died with him.

The wind blew snow across the plateau. Up in the grey clouds, the pressure that had stood over the plateau all morning withdrew all at once, and the sky was suddenly very ordinary.

Qin Wuyan came down out of the clouds a few moments later.

He landed lightly on the rock beside Shi Feng. The front of his Pavilion robe was cut open from the collar to the belt, cleanly, without a drop of blood. He looked at the dead man first, then at Shi Feng.

“It watched,” Qin Wuyan said. “It will report.”

“Did it fight you?” Shi Feng asked.

“It cut this one’s robe,” Qin Wuyan said. “Only the robe.”

Shi Feng understood. Whatever stood in the clouds hadn’t come to kill an old Pavilion guardian. It had come to make sure the old guardian stayed up there, and to watch how the Fifteenth died.

The Helian came running across the snow first, with Helian Ba at the front swinging his axe over his head and roaring. The Serene Jade patrol came behind them in good order. Commander Wei Changhe’s Ninth Beacon scouts came last, because they’d stopped to write things down.

“You did it!” Helian Ba shouted from fifty paces. “You went into the sky and cut him in half! Shi Feng, you mad bastard, you did it!”

“He went in at peak Shattering Void and came out the same,” a Serene Jade disciple said, staring at the dead man. “Against the Fifteenth. In his own fold.”

“One who survives a great calamity is sure to have good fortune later,” a grey-haired Helian warrior said, and nobody answered him.

Shi Feng got up. His left leg, where the lake had opened the thigh, wouldn’t take his weight, and his left arm hung broken at his side. Blood had filled his boot. He stood on one leg in the falling brown flakes and looked at all of them.

“Did anyone bring congee?” Shi Feng asked, too exhausted to keep standing.

Nobody had.

He sat down on the stones next to the dead man, and waited for somebody to fetch some.