Chapter 1081 — Two Buyers

CHAPTER 1081

Two Buyers

The Sixth Elder sat on Tan Ershu’s cart with his white sleeves folded on his knees. He looked perfectly comfortable.

Shi Feng stood twenty paces in front of him, between the cart and the frozen stream. Behind him three hundred villagers crouched on the ice and didn’t make a sound.

Shi Feng wanted the talk. Every moment the Sixth Elder spent talking was time Qin Wuyan could use. If the man wanted to talk for half an hour, Shi Feng would listen to all of it.

“Speak, then,” Shi Feng said. “I’m listening.”

“Two buyers came to the Heavenly Sect for you, Master Shi,” the Sixth Elder said pleasantly. “That’s very rare. Most men aren’t worth one.”

“Who are they?” Shi Feng asked.

“The first wants you dead,” the Sixth Elder said. “He pays very well, and he pays in things the Sect can’t buy anywhere else. He’s a careful man. He has never signed anything in his life.”

Shi Feng’s eyes narrowed. A man that careful must have a great deal to lose if anyone learned his name.

“And the second?” Shi Feng asked.

“The second wants your hands,” the Sixth Elder said. “The second buyer is closer to home, and I’ll be honest with you, I prefer him. Killing a 6 Mark is a waste. There have only been a handful of 6 Marks below Profound Heaven since the Pavilion was founded, and every one of the others is dead.”

He spread his white sleeves.

“So here are my terms. Come with me. You’ll have a tower of your own inside the Heavenly Sect. Any herb you name, from any market in the Empire, and some that aren’t in any market. Any furnace. No Pavilion rules over you, and no princess’s contracts. A tower, and work, and as long a life as you can make yourself pills for.”

“And the villagers?” Shi Feng asked.

“They’ll be left as they are,” the Sixth Elder said. “If you come quietly.”

On the ice, Tan Ershu made a small, frightened noise and clapped both hands over his own mouth.

Shi Feng let the Sixth Elder believe he was considering it. He was only buying time for Qin Wuyan, and he counted his breaths while he waited. Forty. Fifty.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

The Sixth Elder tilted his head. “May I ask why?”

“You may,” Shi Feng said. “First, I carry the Pavilion’s seal. A guest elder who walks into your tower takes the Pavilion’s name in with him. The Pavilion would hunt me before it hunted you, and it would be right to.”

“The Pavilion has never fought the Heavenly Sect,” the Sixth Elder said mildly.

“It would fight for its name,” Shi Feng said. “Second, I made a promise in the north. It needs me free. A man in your tower can’t keep it, however many furnaces he has.”

“A promise,” the Sixth Elder repeated, amused.

“Third,” Shi Feng said, not looking round at the ice. “They’re behind me. If I go with you quietly, you’ll leave nothing behind you in this basin that can talk. Your first buyer is careful. You told me so yourself.”

The Sixth Elder was silent for a moment.

Then he sighed. It was a long sigh, and he seemed truly regretful.

“Those are three good reasons,” the Sixth Elder said. “I’m sorry they’re good. It means I have to persuade you another way.”

He stood up off the cart.

He didn’t hurry even now. He raised his right hand, palm forward, and between one breath and the next a cold white light gathered in it.

“Pale Moon Palm,” the Sixth Elder said.

The light came off his palm at Shi Feng.

It wasn’t fast. It was simply there, already crossing the twenty paces in a broad pale sheet of cold. Shi Feng threw himself left with a Void-Crossing Step, trying to clear its edge. On any other ground it would have taken him across the lane. In the Cage it took him two paces, and the edge of the light caught his left arm.

He felt nothing at first.

Then his arm was white. The skin went white from the fingertips to the elbow, and frost stood up on it in fine needles. He tried to move the fingers and they wouldn’t close. He reached into the arm with his qi to warm it, and the qi stopped at the elbow and wouldn’t go further. It wasn’t blocked. It was frozen solid in his meridians, and the cold was creeping up toward his shoulder.

The villagers on the ice gasped.

“His arm! Look at his arm!”

“It’s gone white! It’s like the dead!”

“He only touched the edge of it! Only the edge!”

Shi Feng stood straight again, holding the frozen arm against his side. The pain was severe, and his face had gone pale, but he kept his voice steady.

“That was your first argument,” Shi Feng said. “My answer hasn’t changed.”

“That was the gentlest,” the Sixth Elder said politely. “The cold stops at the elbow, for now. It doesn’t have to. Shall we talk again? I have all night, Master Shi. Your guardian has rather less.”

Shi Feng didn’t answer him.

Shi Feng was looking past the Sixth Elder’s shoulder, up the basin to the north, where Qin Wuyan and the Ninth Elder had vanished. Over there, the grey of the dome wasn’t the same as it was everywhere else.

It was thinner.