Chapter 1082 — The Seam

CHAPTER 1082

The Seam

Shi Feng ran north to look at the thin place in the dome.

He went along the frozen stream, away from the cart and the villagers. The Sixth Elder let him get thirty paces before he followed. He didn’t run. He walked, yet every step covered ten of Shi Feng’s.

Riverless Step barely held. The art walked on anything that flowed, but the Cage had locked everything, and the stream’s water barely crawled under the ice. Shi Feng put his weight on what flow there was. He slipped, caught himself and ran on.

A Pale Moon Palm came over his shoulder. He went down flat on the ice, and the cold light passed over him and turned a pine on the bank white from root to crown.

Shi Feng got up and kept running. He studied the Cage as he ran.

The Cage was an array, and Shi Feng could read an array’s lines. The grey dome wasn’t one wall. It was two layers, an outer and an inner, laid one over the other with their lines crossed. Where the lines crossed, they held.

But the Ninth Elder had peeled the inner layer away to make his fold. Every bit of strength he had left was going into holding Qin Wuyan inside it. Above the place where the two of them had vanished, the inner layer was gone. There was only the outer wall, with nothing crossed behind it.

Shi Feng had found the seam. It ran down the north rim of the basin in a thin grey line, flickering.

“You’ve seen it,” the Sixth Elder said behind him, unconcerned. “You read very quickly, Master Shi. It won’t help you. It’s too narrow for a man in a hurry.”

Shi Feng didn’t answer. He needed a faster way to move than the Elder’s walk, and he studied the ground in front of him.

Locked space wasn’t solid. An array locked space in pieces, and between the pieces there were cracks. They were very thin and very short, lines in the air where one piece of locked space met the next. In open space a Void-Crossing Step never needed them. Inside the Cage, they were the only way through.

He stepped into the nearest crack to test it.

It took him three body-lengths. He came out of it in a different crack and stepped again, and again, three body-lengths each time, never more, but never stopping. The cracks ran crooked, and he followed them crooked, and the ground went by under him faster than the Sixth Elder could walk.

The Void-Crossing Step had been at Major Success since the first winter on the north road. Now, in a hundred li of locked space with a Profound Heaven Elder behind him, Shi Feng learned to step through whatever gaps were left. The art no longer needed open air at all.

[Art: Void-Crossing Step, Perfection | Note: locked space has cracks.]

The Sixth Elder stopped walking.

“Ah,” the Sixth Elder said, interested.

Shi Feng was already gone. He crossed back down the basin through the cracks, past the Elder’s flank, and came out on the ice in front of the villagers. He was relieved to find them all still there.

“Get up!” Shi Feng said. “All of you, get up! Headman, there’s a gap in the sky on the north rim. Take them through it.”

Tan Ershu stared up at him, terrified. His beard was still singed on one side.

“A gap in the sky?” Tan Ershu said shrilly. “Young master, I’m a headman! I don’t know how to walk through the sky!”

“You only have to walk,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll open it for you. Go now.”

The villagers went. Three hundred people in nightclothes and sheepskins stumbled up the frozen stream, carrying children and helping the old, while Tan Ershu waved his red sash at their head and shouted at everyone to hurry.

The Sixth Elder turned toward them.

Shi Feng stepped through a crack and came out in front of him with the grey Sword drawn in his right hand.

Shi Feng couldn’t win, so he chose to hold the Elder’s attention. He cut once at the Elder’s mask and was gone through another crack before the white sleeve came up. He came in again from the left and cut at the knee, then vanished and came in from behind.

Each time, the Sixth Elder turned to swat him, and each time Shi Feng drew him a little further south, away from the stream.

“You’re leading me,” the Sixth Elder said, amused. “How kind.”

A Pale Moon Palm caught the edge of Shi Feng’s coat and froze it solid. He tore the coat off as he stepped and let it fall behind him. The cold bit through his inner robe.

At the north rim the seam was a flickering line in the grey, no wider than a man’s hand. Shi Feng came out of a crack beside it and tore at it with his one good hand. Anywhere else in the Cage a rift would have shut on his fingers. Here, with only the outer wall, it held. It opened to a gap as wide as a narrow door, and through it he saw the dark rim of the basin and the free snow falling on the other side.

“Through!” Shi Feng said. “One at a time! Go!”

The villagers went through, mothers and children first, then the old men. The gap shivered every time someone passed. Shi Feng held it open with his hand, and holding it drained his qi fast. The frozen half of his arm burned with cold up to the shoulder.

The last one in the line was Tan Ershu.

The headman stopped at the gap and turned round.

“Young master,” Tan Ershu said, his voice shaking. “Young master, you come too…”

Behind them, the Sixth Elder had stopped turning south and was walking toward the gap.

Shi Feng put his hand flat on Tan Ershu’s chest and pushed him through.