Chapter 1077 — Lower Pine

CHAPTER 1077

Lower Pine

There were three of them at the gate, and they’d come out of the dark on foot.

They were herb-gatherers in sheepskin coats. One had the hair burned off one side of his head. Another held his left hand against his chest, the fingers blistered white. The gate guards sat them by the courtyard brazier, and the whole house came out to look.

“Bandits!” the burned man gasped. “In the basin! They came at dusk! They’re burning Lower Pine!”

“How many?” Shi Feng asked, crouching in front of him.

“Thirty? Forty? They had masks! They’re putting everyone in the drying sheds!” The burned man grabbed Shi Feng’s sleeve. “My wife’s in there! My little girl!”

Wanyan Che pushed through the servants, his sword already at his belt.

“Weeping Pine Basin is half a night’s ride,” Wanyan Che said quickly. “The house can send riders at first light. In the dark, on that road, they’d only be killed too.”

Shi Feng stood up, troubled.

He suspected a trap. The Pavilion chart had pointed at the basin, and on the same night the basin was burning. But the attack might also be exactly what it looked like. Masked men were putting a village into its own drying sheds, and they would set fire to the sheds when they were done.

Shi Feng chose to go anyway. Even if it was bait, the people in those sheds were real.

“I’m going now,” Shi Feng said. “Find me a horse that doesn’t spook at fire.”

Qin Wuyan was already at the gate with the road bag on his shoulder. Shi Feng was grateful; he hadn’t needed to ask.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said, walking over. “If there’s a Profound Heaven cultivator in that basin…”

“It is this one’s,” Qin Wuyan said. “Below that, it is yours.”

“And the villagers?” Shi Feng asked.

“This one will see to them,” Qin Wuyan said.

They rode out with the burned man clinging behind Shi Feng’s saddle to show the way. Hong Lie stayed at the patriarch’s door. Wanyan Che stood at the gate with a lantern and watched them go.

The basin opened under them before the end of the second watch.

It was a long bowl of snow between two rims of black weeping pines, with a frozen stream along the bottom. Halfway down, Lower Pine Village was on fire. Seven or eight roofs were burning.

Shi Feng left the horse at the rim so it wouldn’t warn anyone, and went down on foot.

The drying sheds stood in a row at the village’s edge, long pine buildings where the herb-gatherers hung their roots. Their doors were barred from outside, and people were crying inside. At least thirty masked men in grey stood along the row with torches and blades.

Qin Wuyan walked out of the dark past Shi Feng and raised his right hand.

“Still Mountain Seal,” Qin Wuyan said.

Qin Wuyan pressed his palm down.

The air over the sheds went heavy. Every masked man in the row stopped where he was. Their torches kept burning, but none of them could lower an arm. One man was caught mid-step with his boot off the snow. They hadn’t been struck. Qin Wuyan’s Profound Heaven pressure held them in place, and none of them could move a finger against it.

“Open the sheds!” a voice shrieked from somewhere low down. “The bars! Lift the bars! Ah, ah, my beard’s on fire!”

A fat man in a headman’s red sash was lying under an overturned cart at the end of the lane. His beard was smoking. He slapped it out with both hands and kept shouting.

“I’m Tan Ershu, I’m the headman! There’s one more! There’s one more of them! On the granary roof! No, the other roof! The tall one! The one that isn’t burning yet!”

Shi Feng looked up.

A man was standing on the granary ridge. He wore the same grey mask as the others, but his coat was black and long, with a cord of white bone beads at the collar. He had watched from there the whole time. The seal hadn’t been laid on him, and Shi Feng understood why: below Profound Heaven, Qin Wuyan had left the fight to him.

His aura reached Shi Feng a moment later. It was peak Shattering Void, very close to Profound Heaven, and Shi Feng grew wary.

“Master Shi,” the masked man said pleasantly. “The Pavilion’s guardian holds my men, and the Pavilion’s alchemist comes for me. That’s fair.”

The masked man drew his sword.

It was a long, narrow blade, and from its guard hung a lantern no bigger than a fist, made of thin carved bone. A pale light burned inside it.

“Bone-Lantern Sword,” the masked man said.

The lantern swung, and its light fell across the lane.

Shi Feng felt it touch his right sleeve. It didn’t burn. It went through the cloth and into the qi under it, and the qi came apart.

The masked man came down off the roof with the blade first.

Shi Feng swept his right sleeve up to take the blade. The Quiet Sleeve Art at Major Success could close a sleeve around a hook, a chain or a thrown dagger, and hide what went in. He’d caught a dozen blades this way.

But the sleeve held no qi.

The lantern light had stripped the qi out of it before the blade arrived. It was just cloth, and the narrow sword went through it and opened a line across his forearm.

Shi Feng slid back two paces on the snow. Blood ran down to his wrist, and the cut stung in the cold.

“Again,” the masked man said, coming on again.

Shi Feng tried once more, testing whether his timing had been at fault. He poured qi into the sleeve faster this time, a breath before the light reached it.

The light reached it anyway. The sleeve went slack. The blade cut the cloth away at the elbow, and only a twist of his whole body kept it out of his ribs.

Under the cart, Tan Ershu screamed. “His sleeve! His sleeve’s gone! Somebody help the young master!”

Shi Feng stood in the burning lane with half a sleeve and a bleeding arm. He was angry with himself for trusting the art twice. He studied the bone lantern.

Shi Feng understood it now. However fast he moved his qi, the light stripped whatever qi was closest to it.

Shi Feng thought, Then I have to give it something closer to take.