Chapter 1042 — The Hundred-Grave Chain

CHAPTER 1042

The Hundred-Grave Chain

The singing stopped when the first masked man dropped off the cliff.

He landed on the road in front of the lead wagon in a burst of snow. More dropped beside him and behind the last wagon. Grey figures descended both gorge walls. Shi Feng counted as they landed. Twenty. Twenty-six. Thirty.

They wore grey cloth masks and plain dark coats. Shi Feng swept them once with Spirit Sense. Most were Deity Transformation. Six of them were Shattering Void.

“Bandits!” a driver screamed. “Bandits in the gorge!”

Mules reared as the caravan stopped. Eleven wagons stood trapped between masked men and three hundred feet of cliff. The nails prevented anyone from tearing a rift out.

Shi Feng crossed two hundred paces with Riverless Step before the driver finished screaming. He landed in front of the lead wagon to shield the caravan.

“Everyone under the wagons,” Shi Feng said. “Now. Daoist, you too.”

Daoist Mingshu didn’t argue. He dived under the nearest wagon with his ruler clutched to his chest.

“Do as he says!” Du Heng roared, dragging the nearest driver down by the collar. He was the caravan master, a broad man with a frosted beard. “Under! All of you, under!”

The drivers went after them in a rush.

The masked men didn’t attack. They spread out around the caravan in a loose ring and stood still, weapons drawn, waiting.

Qin Wuyan landed at Shi Feng’s shoulder. He didn’t look at the thirty. He looked up, at the ridge on the right-hand wall, where the cliff top met the grey sky.

Shi Feng felt it a breath later. It was the same pressure that had stood in the clouds over Bitter Sky Plateau, or one very like it, and it was sitting on that ridge without moving.

“Profound Heaven,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Go,” Shi Feng said.

Qin Wuyan went up the cliff alone, in three steps, without tearing anything, and was gone over the edge.

The moment he was gone, one more man came down.

He didn’t jump from the cliff. He dropped straight out of the grey sky above the road and landed twenty paces in front of Shi Feng without a sound. He was tall and gaunt, in a grey robe with long grey sleeves, and his face was long and grim. From each wrist hung a black chain, coiled loose in his hands, every link as thick as a thumb and carved with tiny graves.

His steady aura was peak Shattering Void.

“The Heavenly Sect’s Thirteenth Elder,” the man said politely, and inclined his head. “Master Shi.”

“You heard about the Fifteenth,” Shi Feng said.

“We all heard,” the Thirteenth Elder said. “He wanted you whole. He wanted a fair fight. It was his weakness.” He let the chains slide a little further out of his hands. “I don’t want either. The order is still alive, hands unharmed. The rest of you is negotiable.”

He tilted his head at the ring of masked men around the caravan.

“They’ll stand there as long as you stand in front of me,” the Thirteenth Elder said. “If you run, they won’t.”

Shi Feng’s face went still. The good humour he’d carried out of Beiling was gone.

“Then I’m not running,” Shi Feng said.

“Good,” the Thirteenth Elder said, and threw the right-hand chain.

It came straight at Shi Feng’s chest, fast and low. He brought the grey Sword up and took it on the flat of the blade, a clean block, the chain ringing off the steel.

Then the rest of the chain came out of the air behind the blade.

The links had gone into a fold on one side of the sword and out on the other. In a breath they’d wound twice around the grey Sword and his right wrist. They tightened at once and bit into his wrist.

“Hundred-Grave Chain,” the Thirteenth Elder said. “What it touches, it keeps.”

Shi Feng understood the danger at once. Every chain ran partly through folded space. Wherever it touched, it remembered, and it could come back to that place out of any fold it liked. A blocked blow didn’t end anything. It just gave the chain a place to hold.

He reached for Void-Crossing Step to slip the bind, and held it back. The chain was round his wrist. A step would only carry it with him, and the Elder at its other end.

So he poured qi down his right arm instead, all at once, and wrenched. The links slid half an inch on the sword. He wrenched again and they came off the blade, and he pulled his wrist free with the skin torn round it.

The Thirteenth Elder let the chain go slack and draw back.

“Once,” the Thirteenth Elder said.

The left-hand chain was already moving.

Shi Feng didn’t block it. He’d learned that much. He went sideways on Riverless Step and let it pass him by a hand’s width, and it hit nothing.

But it didn’t need to hit anything. In the first exchange, the right-hand chain had brushed his left forearm when it wound past the sword. It had touched him there. It remembered.

The right-hand chain came out of empty air behind him.

It wrapped his left arm from the wrist to the shoulder and went once round his chest, and then again, pinning the arm to his side. Then both chains tightened together, and the links bit through his sleeve and into him. Bone creaked in his left arm, the same arm Rong Tianshou had broken on the plateau.

The terrified drivers cried out beneath their wagons.

“He’s caught! They’ve caught him!”

“Don’t look! Don’t look!”

“Twice round! It’s gone round him twice!”

The Thirteenth Elder began to reel him in, hand over hand, without hurrying.

Riverless Step at Perfection walked on anything that flowed. A chain sliding through a fold flowed. Shi Feng set his feet on the moving links and let them carry him, and for half a breath the coils loosened as he moved with them instead of against them.

Half a breath wasn’t enough to free his arm cleanly. Shi Feng chose to pull anyway. If the Elder dragged him closer, he’d lose his chance.

He pulled. His left arm came out of the coils, and the skin of it didn’t. It tore away from the shoulder to the wrist and stayed in the chain’s links, and Shi Feng slid down the moving chain and off it, and landed on his feet on the frozen road ten paces to the side with his arm red and raw and running blood onto the snow.

Shi Feng clenched his jaw against the pain. Daoist Mingshu cried out from beneath the lead wagon.

The Thirteenth Elder looked at what was left in his chain. Then he looked at Shi Feng, and for the first time his long grim face showed something like interest.

“It knows you now,” the Thirteenth Elder said.

Both chains rose off the snow and hung in the air around him, slowly turning. Then three more came out of nowhere to join them, and the air on Shi Feng’s left side began to bend.