Chapter 1079 — The Hundred-Li Cage

CHAPTER 1079

The Hundred-Li Cage

The grey line reached the rims of the basin and didn’t stop.

It ran on over the pines and out of sight to the east and west. A second line came out of the north, and a third out of the south. Where they crossed they bent downward, and the sky between them turned the colour of ash. In less than ten breaths a grey dome covered the burning village, the frozen stream and both rims of black pines, and reached far beyond them.

The snow stopped falling. The flakes that were already in the air hung where they were for a moment, and then dropped straight down.

“What is that?” a villager whispered. “What’s happened to the sky?”

“Heaven’s angry,” an old woman said, beginning to pray.

Shi Feng raised his right hand and tore the air in front of him, testing whether they could still leave.

It was the simplest thing a Shattering Void cultivator could do. Space opened under his fingers in a black slit as long as his arm, and on the other side he could feel the road above the basin rim, cold and empty.

Then the slit folded shut in his hand.

It didn’t close the way a rift closed when he let it go. It was pushed shut from outside, hard, and the edges bit his fingers as they met.

Shi Feng was alarmed. He opened his hand and looked at the blood on his fingertips.

He tried a Void-Crossing Step toward the stream. On open ground it would have carried him thirty paces in a single step. He came out of it two paces on and stopped dead, stumbling. He raised the Snowfold Screen in front of his chest. Half a sheet of folded space came up and wavered there, thin and grey, and wouldn’t fold the rest of the way.

Shi Feng let the screen fall. Half a sheet wouldn’t stop anything.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said, walking back to him. He kept his voice calm. “Space is locked. I can tear it, but it closes before anything goes through. Void-Crossing Step takes me two paces. The Snowfold Screen gives me half a sheet. Every art I have that works with space is half dead in here.”

“Yes,” Qin Wuyan said.

“How far does it go?” Shi Feng asked.

Qin Wuyan’s Spirit Sense went out across the basin. Shi Feng felt it pass him, wide and slow. Then it came back.

“A hundred li,” Qin Wuyan said. “Perhaps more.”

Shi Feng understood that nobody could build a hundred li of locked space in one night. The Cage had been laid in the ground long before tonight, and the masked man’s pill had only woken it.

He thought of the red ink on the Pavilion chart, and of Wanyan Che, quiet for half a breath too long. Elder Sang had read a death knot on him at the Tianji Mansion, within the season, and the season wasn’t over. Shi Feng was certain now that the fire had been bait.

Behind them, the masked men Qin Wuyan had pinned were starting to move. Qin Wuyan had lifted his seal. He needed all his strength for what was coming, and thirty bandits weren’t worth holding. They scrambled away through the snow without a word, two of them dragging their kneeling leader between them.

“They’re running!” Tan Ershu shouted, crawling out from under the cart. “Look, the bandits are running! We’ve won!”

Nobody answered him.

Out on the white floor of the basin, where the dome came down toward the stream, two people were walking toward the village.

They came without hurrying. The first was thin and stooped, his grey coat hanging off his shoulders, a string of black iron nails clinking at his belt. The second was tall, with white sleeves to the fingertips. Both wore plain masks, and the tall man’s was painted with a thin crescent moon.

Their auras arrived before they did.

The pressure came down on Lower Pine all at once. The crying stopped. The praying stopped. A child who’d been screaming for her mother closed her mouth in the middle of a scream and stood there trembling with her eyes shut. Three hundred people went silent together, and the only sound left was the fire on the roofs.

Shi Feng felt the two auras one at a time.

The thin man was Profound Heaven. It was the early stage, the same as Qin Wuyan’s, and the grey of the dome was thicker around him. Shi Feng judged that he had built the Cage.

The tall man was more. It was mid Profound Heaven, deep and very still, and when it touched Shi Feng he couldn’t feel the bottom of it.

Shi Feng weighed it. There were two Profound Heaven cultivators against one guardian at early Profound Heaven and one peak Shattering Void alchemist with a cut arm.

Shi Feng was worried. They couldn’t win this by strength.

The two masked men stopped at the edge of the lane, twenty paces from the cart. The thin one looked up at the grey dome with something like pride. Then he slid one iron nail out of his belt and turned it over in his fingers.

“The Hundred-Li Cage,” the thin man said in a dry, cracked voice. “Nine years in the ground. It’s good to see it stand.”

The tall man ignored him. He ignored Qin Wuyan as well, looked straight at Shi Feng and bowed. It was a proper bow, from the waist, with both white sleeves together.

“Guest Elder Shi of the Sky Pavilion,” the tall man said politely. “The Pavilion’s alchemist. The Sixth on the Tianxing. Master of the Sixth Mark.” He straightened. “This elder is the Sixth of the Heavenly Sect. My colleague is the Ninth. The coincidence of our numbers pleased me very much when I heard of it.”

He smiled behind the painted moon. Shi Feng could hear it in his voice.

“Please don’t be alarmed,” the Sixth Elder said. “We only came to talk.”