Chapter 1084 — The Moon in the Ice

CHAPTER 1084

The Moon in the Ice

The first palm didn’t come from the Sixth Elder. It came from the moon.

Pale light fell out of the two broken halves overhead and came down on Shi Feng from directly above. He saw it coming. He started to move, and his body went sideways at the speed the Severed Moon Heaven allowed, which was half the speed he meant.

The light hit him full in the chest and drove him down onto one knee.

The ice under his knee cracked, and a rib in his chest broke with it. He felt the short, hard snap under the skin. Then the cold came pouring in through the place the palm had struck.

His golden bones took the rest. They held, and the cold stopped at them.

“Good bones,” the Sixth Elder’s voice said from everywhere. “Very good bones. I wondered how a Shattering Void stood under a Profound Heaven’s pressure for ten breaths at the Wanyan house. Now I know.”

Shi Feng struggled to his feet. The broken rib stabbed him with every breath.

He tried a Void-Crossing Step toward the Elder, testing whether this heaven had cracks like the Cage. It didn’t. The Cage had been an array, locked in pieces. This was one man’s heaven, made all of a piece, and there was nothing to step through.

Shi Feng lit the grey Sword and sent the Sunset-Splitting Sword across the ice instead. Red light ran down the blade and left it, and halfway to the Elder it went out. This heaven allowed no light except the moon’s.

“You see?” the Sixth Elder said kindly. “Stop, Master Shi. It hurts me to watch.”

Shi Feng stopped attacking.

He hadn’t obeyed. He’d had an inner heaven under his Spirit Sense only the night before, and he’d spent that night watching a crack close in it. He had examined Wanyan Bo’s heaven as a healer. Shi Feng chose to examine this one the same way.

Shi Feng knew an inner heaven was an imitation. Wanyan Bo’s had copied heaven so closely that real heaven didn’t notice it. Up was up there, and cold was cold, and qi ran the way qi always ran. The imitation was strongest at the centre, where the old man’s will held it. It was thinnest where his will was stretched, and that was where the crack had run.

The Severed Moon Heaven was the same. It copied heaven’s rules and kept them. Cold here was the real cold. Down was the real down. The Sixth Elder could slow a man’s qi to a crawl because qi was his own business inside his own heaven. But he couldn’t throw out the rules he’d copied, or his heaven would stop being a heaven.

Shi Feng thought, Where is this one thin?

Shi Feng looked up at the broken moon. That was the Elder’s. He’d made it, and his will lived in it, and the palm light came out of it.

Then he looked down.

The moon lay in the ice at his feet, perfectly reflected, both halves and the black between them. Nobody had made that reflection. The ice made it by itself, because ice in real heaven reflected the moon, and the Severed Moon Heaven copied real heaven faithfully.

Shi Feng understood. The reflection was a copy of a copy. The Elder’s will lived in the moon. It wasn’t in the reflection at all.

The reflection lay sixty paces away, on the far side of the Sixth Elder.

“You’ve gone quiet,” the Sixth Elder said. “Have you thought of something?”

Shi Feng walked toward him.

He walked slowly, because he could only walk slowly, with the frozen arm against his side and the broken rib grinding. The Sixth Elder watched him come. Light fell from the moon again. This time Shi Feng didn’t try to avoid it. He deliberately turned his already frozen left side to it, so the blow would throw him past the Elder.

It knocked him twenty paces across the ice.

He landed hard, rolled, and came up on one knee, coughing. There was blood in his mouth. Something in his left side had cracked deeper than the ribs, down in the bone itself, and it hurt in a way nothing had hurt since the Bone Refinement realm.

The blow had carried him where he wanted. He was past the Sixth Elder now, kneeling on the reflection of the broken moon.

“What are you doing?” the Sixth Elder asked. He sounded puzzled.

Shi Feng stood up over the reflection and raised the grey Sword above his head with his one good hand.

Shi Feng had one art the Severed Moon Heaven couldn’t slow much. The Falling Star Sword didn’t push, cut or fly. It fell. Falling was one of the rules this heaven had copied from real heaven, and the Elder couldn’t remove it without breaking his own heaven.

He let the sword fall.

It came down at real heaven’s speed, not the Elder’s. The grey blade dropped through the cold air, through the Sixth Elder’s will, and struck the reflection of the moon where the two halves met.

Crack!

The ice split. A white line ran across the reflection from one edge to the other.

And above them, in the black sky, the same line ran across the real moon.

The Sixth Elder screamed.

It wasn’t a scream of pain. The Sixth Elder was enraged, and his voice came from every direction at once, from the ice and the air and the cold. The crack in the moon spread. A piece of white fell away from the edge of one half and dropped slowly into the dark.

Then the Severed Moon Heaven threw him out.

One moment he was standing on the grey ice. The next he was in the air over Weeping Pine Basin under the ash-grey dome, and then he hit the snow.

He hit it hard on his back and slid twenty paces down the slope into a drift.

Shi Feng lay in the drift, unable to rise. Three or four of his ribs were broken. There was blood in his mouth and down his chin. The cracks in his golden bones throbbed with every heartbeat, and his left arm was white to the shoulder.

Twenty paces up the slope the air tore, and the Sixth Elder stepped out of nothing onto the snow.

His right sleeve hung torn from the shoulder. The painted moon on his mask had a hairline crack across it. He stood over Shi Feng for a long time, breathing hard. He was furious, and when he spoke again, all his politeness was gone.

“You little dog,” the Sixth Elder said hoarsely. “You cracked this elder’s heaven. Do you know how many years it took to build?”

Shi Feng spat blood into the snow. He had no breath to answer.

“This elder will take your hands,” the Sixth Elder said. “The rest of you, the other buyer can have.”

Shi Feng looked past him at the north rim of the basin, worried.

The incense stick had burned down a while ago. Qin Wuyan hadn’t come back.