Chapter 1080 — One Incense Stick

CHAPTER 1080

One Incense Stick

Qin Wuyan stepped in front of Shi Feng without a word.

He didn’t draw anything. Shi Feng had never seen him carry a weapon. Qin Wuyan simply moved from beside the cart to the middle of the lane, so that the two masked men would have to go through him first, and stood there with his hands at his sides. Shi Feng was grateful, and afraid for him.

The Ninth Elder sighed.

“The Pavilion’s old dog,” the Ninth Elder said, turning the iron nail over once more. “I was told you’d do that.”

“Then you were told right,” Qin Wuyan said.

The Ninth Elder threw the nail.

It didn’t fly at Qin Wuyan. It struck the frozen ground an arm’s length in front of his boots and stood upright, humming. Grey lines ran out of it across the snow, four of them, and closed in a square around the guardian’s feet. Then the square rose. It went up in four grey walls around Qin Wuyan, as tall as a man, and the space inside them went hard.

“Locked Sky Seal,” the Ninth Elder said.

Inside the walls, Qin Wuyan couldn’t take a step. Shi Feng understood the seal. It fixed the space around the guardian’s body, and a man in fixed space couldn’t move at all.

Qin Wuyan didn’t try to move. He pressed his right palm downward.

“Still Mountain Seal,” Qin Wuyan said.

At Lower Pine the seal had held thirty men still. Now he turned it on himself. All of his Profound Heaven pressure went down into his own feet and the ground beneath them. He wasn’t trying to step. He was pressing down harder than the Ninth Elder’s walls could hold.

The grey walls bent outward.

Boom!

The ground of the basin heaved. Shi Feng felt it come up under his boots and drop again. The nearest drying shed folded in on itself and went flat. The next one followed it. Snow jumped off the roofs, and the burning beams of the granary came down into the lane in a shower of sparks.

The villagers screamed. The pressure had held them silent, but the ground moving under them broke it.

“Back!” Shi Feng shouted. “Get back to the stream! Everyone, to the ice!”

Shi Feng ran among them with his arms out, pushing. Tan Ershu was already running, waving his red sash over his head.

“Go! Go! Follow the headman!” Tan Ershu shouted. “Don’t stop for the goats!”

Behind them, the Locked Sky Seal broke.

The four grey walls burst apart into lines of light and went out. Qin Wuyan took one step forward, out of the place where they’d been, and the Ninth Elder took one step back.

Shi Feng understood what that step meant. They were both early Profound Heaven, but the Ninth Elder had spent nine years pouring his strength into the ground for the Cage. Qin Wuyan had spent two hundred years guarding other people.

The Ninth Elder threw three nails at once, and three new squares rose. Qin Wuyan walked through the first and broke it, broke the second with his palm, and pressed the third flat into the ground with his heel. Every step he took was north, away from the stream. He was deliberately drawing the fight away from the three hundred people crouched on the ice. The Ninth Elder had to give ground the same way or be walked over.

In twenty breaths they were half a li up the basin. In forty, they were a li.

Shi Feng could follow almost none of it. He saw the grey lines and the heaving of the ground and he felt the two pressures grinding against each other. But most of what passed between them happened inside the space itself, and at peak Shattering Void he could only see the edges of it.

The Sixth Elder hadn’t moved. He stood at the edge of the lane with his white sleeves folded and watched the guardian walk his partner up the valley.

“You’re not going to help him?” Shi Feng asked.

“Senior Qin is owed a fair fight,” the Sixth Elder said politely. “Your Pavilion keeps its rules. Tonight, we’ll keep ours.”

Shi Feng didn’t believe him. His sect had spent nine years laying this trap. It hadn’t come for a fair fight.

A li up the basin, the Ninth Elder stopped retreating. He raised both hands toward the grey dome overhead, and the dome answered him.

A layer peeled off the inside of the Cage.

It came down out of the sky, enormous and thin, and it folded around the Ninth Elder and Qin Wuyan together. Shi Feng saw the guardian look up. He saw him put his whole weight into his heels. Then the grey sheet closed over both of them, and it began to fold again, and again, smaller each time.

Qin Wuyan’s voice came through the last seam before it shut, perfectly calm.

“Hold one incense stick.”

Then the seam closed.

Where the two Elders had been fighting there was nothing. There was no fold in the air, no rift, no sound. The snow was trampled flat in a ring a hundred paces wide, and in the middle of it one black iron nail stood upright in the ground.

The basin was very quiet.

On the ice, three hundred villagers stared at the empty place where the guardian had been. Tan Ershu’s mouth was open. He shut it slowly.

“Where did he go?” a boy whispered. “Where did the old grandfather go?”

Nobody could tell him.

An incense stick was half an hour. Qin Wuyan never said anything he didn’t mean, or anything he wasn’t sure of. If he’d asked for half an hour, then in half an hour he expected to be back, or he expected to be dead. Shi Feng was afraid for him, but he trusted the words.

Either way, Shi Feng had to hold the Sixth Elder for that half hour.

Behind him, the Sixth Elder sighed, walked over to the headman’s overturned cart, and set it back on its wheels with one hand.

“There,” the Sixth Elder said, and sat down on it. “Now we can talk properly.”