Chapter 1087 — The Frozen Stream

CHAPTER 1087

The Frozen Stream

The sweep came back from the north-east, the same as it had come back nine times in the night.

Shi Feng sat with his back to the cave wall and felt it pass. It brushed the cave mouth and dragged over the gullies where his false fires had burned in the night. Then it stopped.

It didn’t move on. It came back, slowly, and settled on the cave.

“He’s found us,” Shi Feng said, putting down the strip of dried mutton in his hand.

Tan Ershu froze with the waterskin halfway to his mouth. He had talked since dawn about his grandson, his goats, the price of snow-ginseng in Hanyuan and a cousin who’d once seen a dragon. Now he was too frightened to speak.

“How?” Tan Ershu whispered, the waterskin shaking in his hands. “You put the fire out!”

“I put the fire out,” Shi Feng said, getting up with one hand on the rock. “I couldn’t put the smell out. A blood pill smells for a day. He’s been following it since dawn.”

Shi Feng didn’t regret refining it. Without that pill, he wouldn’t be standing now.

He pointed to a narrow split in the rock at the back of the cave.

“Where does that come out?” Shi Feng asked.

“On top of the cliff, above the stream,” Tan Ershu said. “My grandson uses it to hide from his mother.”

“Then go up it and keep going south along the ridge,” Shi Feng said. “Get into the rocks and stay there. Don’t come down, whatever you hear.”

Tan Ershu clutched the flute to his chest. He was terrified, and his lips were trembling, but he didn’t move.

“I’m the headman of Lower Pine!” Tan Ershu said, too loudly. “You pushed my whole village out first. A drop of kindness is repaid with a gushing spring! I’m not leaving a guest in my cave to die alone!”

Shi Feng was moved. Tan Ershu was shaking so hard his teeth clicked, and he still refused to leave.

“Thank you for staying,” Shi Feng said, turning him by the shoulder toward the crack. “But Lower Pine needs its headman. If you die here, your grandson gets his flute back from a stranger. Go.”

Tan Ershu looked at him for a long moment. Then he squeezed into the crack, flute first, and his boots scraped away into the dark.

Shi Feng walked out of the cave mouth to meet the Elder on the ice.

The cave opened onto a frozen stream twenty paces across. A sixty-foot cliff of black rock rose on the far bank, with pines leaning over its top. Above it hung the Cage’s ash-grey dome.

Shi Feng had chosen this place on purpose. Riverless Step was made for water, and it worked on ice. On the locked rock of the slopes the art barely held him. On the stream it held firmly.

The Sixth Elder came down the stream from the north-east, the direction the sweep always returned from.

He walked on the ice without a sound. His grey mask was the same, but his right sleeve still hung torn from the night in his inner heaven. He stopped thirty paces upstream.

“Pavilion alchemist,” the Sixth Elder said, folding his hands in his sleeves. “This elder brings news. The buyer for your hands has withdrawn.”

“And the other buyer?” Shi Feng asked.

“Paid in full,” the Sixth Elder said. “So this elder doesn’t need you whole anymore.”

Shi Feng understood it at once. The Heavenly Sect had wanted his hands for its furnaces. Someone else had wanted him dead. Only the second order still stood, and the Sixth Elder no longer had a reason to hold back.

The Elder’s right hand came out of his sleeve.

The Pale Moon Palm crossed thirty paces as a disc of cold white light.

Shi Feng’s frozen left arm was still white to the shoulder, and overnight the cold had crept up into his neck. If he met this palm with half his meridians frozen, it would freeze the other half. Shi Feng chose to light the Third Anvil Fire inside his own meridians.

It was the third and hottest fire of the Thousand Forge Flame, and he had only reached Entry with it. He had never put it inside his own body before. It burned the Pale Moon cold out of his arm in one breath, and it burned the meridians along with it. The pain was terrible, but he needed the arm.

Smoke came out of his sleeve. The white skin went red. His arm moved.

Riverless Step took him two paces left across the ice. The palm-light hit where he’d stood, and the stream turned white and split for ten paces in both directions.

The second palm came faster, straight at his chest. The cliff was behind him and there was nowhere to step.

Shi Feng drew and cut once, flat across.

He didn’t try to block the force. Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection cut along the weakest line through it. The disc of light split in two, and the halves passed on either side of him. One frosted the cliff face white. The other hit a pine on the clifftop, and the tree cracked and fell onto the ice behind him.

The Sixth Elder was angered. He came down the stream himself to close the distance.

He closed from twenty paces to ten, his right palm already glowing for a third strike. At ten paces Shi Feng wouldn’t have time to find a line through it.

The Cage locked space, but locked space still had cracks. Since Void-Crossing Step reached Perfection, he could see them. There was one above and behind the Elder, three body-lengths up.

Shi Feng stepped through it to get above the Elder’s guard.

For half a breath he hung in the grey air over the Elder’s head. Then he let the Falling Star Sword drop.

The Falling Star Sword couldn’t change course once it fell, so Shi Feng aimed it where the Elder’s palm would have to rise to meet it.

The palm came up. The sword fell through the light and opened the Sixth Elder’s palm to the bone.

Blood hit the ice.

Shi Feng landed four paces away, and his broken ribs ground together so hard that his sight went white. He kept his feet.

“He cut him!” Tan Ershu’s voice shrieked from the clifftop. “Ancestors in heaven, the alchemist cut him!”

Shi Feng was exasperated. Tan Ershu hadn’t gone south at all.

The Sixth Elder stared at his palm in disbelief. Blood ran between his fingers and dripped steadily onto the stream. Few Shattering Void cultivators ever touched a Profound Heaven Elder, and a peak Shattering Void had just drawn his blood.

“This elder hasn’t bled in two hundred years,” the Sixth Elder said quietly.

He closed his hand.

“Enough,” the Sixth Elder said.

Above the stream, the grey sky started to come down.