Chapter 1073 — Ten Breaths

CHAPTER 1073

Ten Breaths

The thirty-pace courtyard was paved in swept black granite. Two hundred Wanyan crowded its three galleries under the lamps. The sickroom’s outer door stood north, behind the main hall.

Hong Lie stopped ten paces in front of that door and turned.

Shi Feng stood in the courtyard centre, hands empty, grey Sword sheathed at his hip. His right palm remained bound.

“Nine Weights Palm,” Hong Lie said. “Nine layers. One more each breath. On the tenth breath, if you’re standing, you go in.”

“And if I fall on the fifth?” Shi Feng asked.

“Then you’ll go home like five of the seven,” Hong Lie said, and pushed his palm out flat.

One.

The air came down on Shi Feng’s shoulders. It wasn’t a blow. It was weight, laid on him from above and all sides at once, and it held. The snow at the edges of the courtyard pressed flat.

That was only the first layer, and it was already heavier than anything a Shattering Void cultivator could put out.

Two.

The second layer came down on the first. Shi Feng’s robe pressed flat against his body. His boots sank a hair’s breadth into the granite.

Three.

He understood what the art was doing by the third breath. Profound Heaven pressure wasn’t only weight. Each layer carried a little of the law Hong Lie had written into his own inner heaven, and that law said one thing: be still. Inside nine layers of it, a man’s qi would be told to sit down in his meridians and stop moving. That was why five of the seven had failed. They’d tried to push back with qi, and their qi had stopped answering them.

So Shi Feng didn’t push with qi.

He let the weight go down into his bones.

Four.

The granite under his feet cracked. A thin line ran out from his left heel to the edge of the courtyard. Under his skin, his golden bones took the load one by one, spine, hips, legs, and held it. They didn’t need qi to stand. They’d been refined to stand.

“He’s not moving,” someone whispered in the gallery.

Five.

The crack under his feet became a star of cracks. Something warm ran from his nose over his lip, and he tasted iron. His knees didn’t bend. His bones creaked inside him, every one of them, and still held, but he could feel exactly where they’d stop holding. The sixth layer would be past it.

Hong Lie’s eyes narrowed.

Six.

As the sixth layer came down, Shi Feng opened the Snowfold Screen.

At Major Success it didn’t need a gesture. A sheet of folded space opened above his head and shoulders, thin and flat, and the sixth layer landed in the fold instead of on him. Shi Feng tilted the fold to his left. The weight slid down along it and poured out into the empty granite two paces from his foot.

Crack!

That flagstone burst into gravel.

“He moved it!” a boy shouted in the gallery. “Where did it go? He moved it into the floor!”

Seven.

The seventh layer came down. Shi Feng tilted the screen again, and another flagstone two paces to his right shattered. But the fold was holding up two layers now, and the screen ran through his left arm. His left hand went cold, then numb, and the numbness climbed toward his elbow.

Eight.

Two more flagstones burst together, in front of him and behind. Gravel jumped across the courtyard. The galleries had gone completely silent. His left arm was numb to the shoulder now. He couldn’t feel the screen anymore, only see the snow sliding off it.

Hong Lie’s face hadn’t changed, but there was sweat on his bald head. Nine layers were his whole art.

Nine.

Hong Lie leaned into his palm, and the ninth layer came down on everything.

Shi Feng’s right hand dropped to the grey Sword’s hilt.

He didn’t draw it. A drawn sword would have had to cut through nine layers of pressure, and no sword at peak Shattering Void could cut that much Profound Heaven law. So he used Falling Star Sword instead. Its stroke didn’t travel through the air. It dropped from above, through folded space, and came down where he sent it. The layers lay on top of the courtyard. The stroke went in under them.

The sheathed blade came down out of nowhere and stopped against Hong Lie’s collar, a finger’s width from his throat.

The scabbard was still on it.

Hong Lie looked down at it. The weight on the courtyard stayed exactly where it was.

“Ten,” Hong Lie said.

He lowered his palm, and the nine layers lifted all at once. Snow blew back across the black granite. Shi Feng stood in the middle of a ring of broken flagstones with blood on his lip and his left arm hanging, and took the scabbard back from the old man’s throat.

The galleries exploded.

“Ten breaths! He stood the full ten!”

“Uncle Hong put out all nine layers! I’ve never seen him put out all nine!”

“A Shattering Void cultivator, under Profound Heaven, for ten breaths!”

“He didn’t even draw his sword!”

“…”

Hong Lie stepped back from the sickroom door. Then the old guardian put his fists together and bowed, deeply, to a peak Shattering Void cultivator in front of the whole house.

“Master Shi,” Hong Lie said gruffly. “The door is open.”

Wanyan Che stared at the broken courtyard. Up in the main hall, the patriarch had pushed himself forward on his seat to see through the doorway, and his grey face had a little colour in it.

Shi Feng wiped his bloody lip. His left arm hung numb and wouldn’t recover before morning.

“Master Hong,” Shi Feng said. “Next time, put the rule on the commission. I’d have rested my arm before coming.”

Laughter spread through the galleries.

Hong Lie didn’t laugh. But he held the sickroom door open himself.