Chapter 1083 — The Severed Moon

CHAPTER 1083

The Severed Moon

Shi Feng couldn’t use the seam himself.

It was wide enough. He could have turned sideways and gone through it in a breath. But the Sixth Elder was forty paces behind him, and three hundred villagers were standing in the snow on the other side. If Shi Feng went out through that gap, the Sixth Elder would follow a breath later, and nothing would stand between him and the village.

Shi Feng chose to stay. He took his hand off the seam, and it narrowed at once to a flickering grey line.

On the other side, Tan Ershu was shouting. The wall swallowed the words.

Shi Feng turned round and put his back to the seam.

The Sixth Elder had stopped forty paces off, his white sleeves hanging, the painted moon on his mask turned toward Shi Feng. He was silent for a while, surprised by the choice.

“You could have gone,” the Sixth Elder said finally.

“I could have,” Shi Feng said.

“Most men would have,” the Sixth Elder said.

“They’re on the other side of it,” Shi Feng said, reaching into his ring with his good hand. “If I leave, you follow them.”

Four waste pills were left in it, scorched failures from the last month’s furnaces that he’d carried since Beiling. Their herbs had been worth about three hundred thousand. Nobody else could eat them, but the herbs’ qi was still inside, and Shi Feng’s body could take it back. They were all the stock he had.

He put all four into his mouth and swallowed.

The herbs’ qi flooded into him. It was raw and bitter, nothing like a good pill, and it burned in his meridians as it came. It filled his sea of qi, nearly dry since the roofs of Lower Pine, back to the brim. Then it ran down into his frozen arm. It couldn’t break the cold at the elbow; it only pressed against it.

The Sixth Elder watched him, curious for the first time.

“Waste pills,” the Sixth Elder said. “You eat waste pills. I’d heard that rumour. I didn’t believe it.”

“They still hold their herbs’ qi,” Shi Feng said. “My body can take it back.”

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword again and set his feet. His qi was full at peak Shattering Void, but he had one good arm, a seam at his back he couldn’t use, and a Profound Heaven Elder in front of him whom he couldn’t beat.

He had perhaps a third of the incense stick left. He only needed to last until Qin Wuyan came back.

The Sixth Elder looked at him for another moment. Then he sighed, the same honest sigh as before.

“I meant to take you without this,” the Sixth Elder said. “Remember that I tried.”

He didn’t raise his hand this time. Instead, he released his inner heaven.

Shi Feng felt it before he saw it. The pressure didn’t come down on him. It came out around him, from the Elder’s body, in every direction at once. The grey dome disappeared. The basin disappeared. The pines, the stream, the seam at his back, all of it was gone in a single breath.

He was standing on a plain of grey ice that went on to every horizon.

There was no wind. The air was still and very cold. Above him hung a black, starless sky, and in its middle hung a broken moon. It had been cut in two from top to bottom. The halves hung a little apart, both shining the same pale white as the Pale Moon Palm.

Under his feet, the ice reflected the broken moon perfectly.

“This is the Severed Moon Heaven,” the Sixth Elder said.

His voice didn’t come from anywhere. It was simply there, in the air, in the ice, in the cold.

Shi Feng had seen the inside of an inner heaven once before. Wanyan Bo’s heaven had been a sky, a plain and a river, and he’d walked through it with his Spirit Sense as a healer. It had let him in. Shi Feng understood the difference at once. This heaven had closed around him to hold him.

“Inside, there is only one law, Master Shi,” the Sixth Elder said. “Mine.”

Shi Feng was afraid, but he kept his face still and raised the grey Sword.

It came up slowly. He felt the qi go into his arm and move down the meridians at a crawl. He wasn’t weaker. Every drop of the qi he’d just swallowed was still there. Shi Feng understood the law. His qi wasn’t allowed to move faster than the Elder let it.

The Sixth Elder stood a hundred paces off on the ice, with the broken moon above him.

“Here,” the Sixth Elder said politely, “you’ll do exactly what I allow.”