Chapter 1043 — Between Two Nails

CHAPTER 1043

Between Two Nails

The chains hung in the air of Nine-Bend Gorge with nothing holding them.

There were five of them now, black iron, each link as thick as a thumb. They came out of nowhere at head height and went back into nowhere a few paces later, because the Hundred-Grave Chain didn’t travel through the air. It travelled through folded space, and it could come out anywhere its master liked.

Shi Feng stood in front of the first wagon with his left arm hanging. From the shoulder to the wrist there was no skin on it.

Behind him, eleven drivers lay under their wagons. Nobody under them was shouting anymore. They’d run out of breath for it.

The Thirteenth Elder had stepped back to a fallen boulder forty paces down the gorge, and stood on it with his grey sleeves folded over his hands. He was peak Shattering Void, the same as Shi Feng, and he looked at the bare arm with professional interest.

“The order says your hands unharmed, Master Shi,” the Thirteenth Elder said politely. “It says nothing about your arms. Come along now, and you keep the other one.”

“Who wrote the order?” Shi Feng asked, flexing his right hand.

“Someone who reads very carefully,” the Thirteenth Elder said.

A chain came out of the air beside the third wagon, low, at the height of a driver’s neck.

Shi Feng couldn’t let it reach the driver. He knew it would tighten around anything it touched, but deliberately reached past the wheel and caught the iron.

The chain wrapped his forearm at once and began to pull.

He lit the Second Anvil Fire in his palm.

Shi Feng used the Thousand Forge Flame to soften the metal. He didn’t need to overpower the whole art if he could ruin its links. The heat ran into the first link and the link went red. Then the second. Then the third, as the chain kept pulling and dragged the heat along behind it into the fold.

“He’s holding it!” a driver shouted from under the wagon. “He’s holding the thing with his bare hand!”

The Thirteenth Elder’s expression changed. He jerked his sleeve, and the chain whipped back into nowhere. It came out again beside him, and seven links glowed orange and sagged.

But the chain had been tight on Shi Feng’s arm the whole time, and the fire had gone both ways. His right forearm was blistered from the wrist to the elbow. The smell of it was very bad.

“Clever,” the Thirteenth Elder said, and he no longer sounded polite. “Then I’ll use the cold ones.”

Four chains came at once, from four folds, above, behind, and on both sides.

Shi Feng looked up at the east cliff.

Two void-lock nails stood out of the rock thirty paces up, a man’s length apart on the same ledge. They were black iron spikes as long as a spear, and runes ran down them in dull red. Whoever had driven them in had meant to stop rifts, and they did. Space for three li had been pinned in place. Between two nails that close, it was pinned harder than anywhere else in the gorge.

A rift folded space. The Hundred-Grave Chain folded space. Void-Crossing Step didn’t fold anything. It crossed the void the short way, ten paces at a time, and nothing in the nails had been made against that.

Shi Feng took three steps.

The first put him on the wagon’s roof. The second put him halfway up the cliff. The third put him on the ledge between the nails, and the four chains snapped out of the air where he had been and hung there, rattling.

They tried to follow. The folds opened at the edge of the ledge and went no further. The links strained at nothing.

“Where did he go?”

“Up there! He’s up on the cliff!”

“Why aren’t the chains going after him?”

“…”

The Thirteenth Elder understood it before the drivers did. He was furious. Shi Feng had used his own nails to block the chains.

He didn’t waste time cursing. He leapt, and peak Shattering Void carried him up the cliff in two bounds, and he landed on the ledge three paces away with the soft chain coiled around his fist. Inside the pinned ground he couldn’t fold it. So he swung it by hand.

It was still heavy iron, and he was still a peak Shattering Void Elder. Shi Feng turned his shoulder into it instead of his head. The links hit his left collarbone, and he heard the bone crack before he felt it.

The Elder swung again. This time Shi Feng caught the soft links with his burned right hand and pulled.

The softened iron stretched. It didn’t break, but it stretched long and thin, and the Elder came half a step forward with it, off balance. That half step put him under the edge of the ledge, where the nails' grip loosened and open space began again.

Shi Feng let go and stepped back out of the pinned ground, above him.

Falling Star Sword had always been one thing. It fell. It came down from a place in space the enemy wasn’t watching, with the whole weight of the drop behind it.

The Thirteenth Elder threw up the chain to guard his head. Against cold iron it might have held. Against seven links Shi Feng had already cooked, it didn’t. The sword went through the iron, through the Elder’s guard, and through the Elder from collarbone to hip.

Bang.

He went down the cliff in two pieces and hit the gorge floor beside his own boulder.

Around the caravan, the thirty masked men looked at the two pieces at the foot of the cliff. Then, without a word between them, they went back up both walls the way they had come and were gone into the snow.

The drivers crawled out from under the wagons.

“He’s dead! The bandit’s dead!”

“Shout it! Shout it down the gorge so the next caravan knows!”

“The Pavilion’s alchemist killed the bandit chief at Nine-Bend!”

“We’re alive! Ancestors, we’re alive!”

The shout went down the gorge from wagon to wagon, and the cliffs threw it back twice.

Shi Feng came down the cliff slowly, one step at a time and without any art, because he didn’t have the qi for one. His left arm had no skin. His right arm had no skin either now, just in a different way. His collarbone ground every time he breathed.

Daoist Mingshu crawled out from under the lead wagon and brushed off his robe. He looked at the body, and then at the alchemist.

“Master Shi,” Daoist Mingshu said faintly. “The Mansion will want to know how that was done.”

“I’ll explain when we get there,” Shi Feng said, sitting heavily on the wagon step. “Let me catch my breath first.”

He looked up at the ridge. Frost was drifting down from it, thin and white in the noon light.

Qin Wuyan hadn’t come down yet.