Chapter 1088 — Whose Junior Brother

CHAPTER 1088

Whose Junior Brother

The Sixth Elder opened only half of the Severed Moon Heaven. He didn’t need more against a wounded man.

Half of it came down over the stream. The grey sky dropped to the clifftop, with a broken moon hanging close overhead. Under Shi Feng’s boots the ice turned flat, dry and grey. It was the Elder’s plain now.

Inside that half, the Sixth Elder’s will was law.

Shi Feng felt his qi slow. It still moved, but only as fast as the Elder allowed.

He searched for a crack in space to step through and found none. The Cage locked space from outside, and locked space had seams. An inner heaven had none. Its owner decided what space did inside it.

“You cracked this elder’s moon once,” the Sixth Elder said, walking toward him across the grey. “You won’t get a second look at it.”

He turned his bleeding palm outward.

The pressure hit Shi Feng from the front all at once. It threw him back across the stream into the black cliff, and it didn’t let him fall. He hung there three feet off the ground, pinned to the rock by his chest and shoulders, with the Elder’s heaven pressing on every part of him.

His golden bones creaked.

The ribs that had broken in the night broke again. The meridians he’d scorched with the Third Anvil Fire burned, and there was no qi to put out the burning. His fingers opened by themselves. The sword’s hilt slipped out of his hand and rang on the stone below.

Shi Feng searched for the moon’s reflection. Last night he’d found it in the ice of the Elder’s plain, the one place where the copy of heaven was thin. Now there was no ice. The Elder had brought only the half of his heaven that had no weak place in it.

Shi Feng had nothing left, and he knew it. He was afraid, but his mind stayed clear.

“Who paid?” Shi Feng asked. The words came out with blood on them.

“Dead men don’t need names,” the Sixth Elder said. “This elder was paid to cut the weeds and pull out the roots. That’s all you need to know.”

He stopped five paces away and raised his torn right hand. Pale light gathered in the open palm, brighter and colder than any palm he’d thrown so far. It was meant to kill him.

On the clifftop above, Tan Ershu was screaming something. Shi Feng couldn’t hear the words.

The palm came down.

Then the grey dome over the basin rang.

It was one long, deep note, and it went across all hundred li of the Cage at once. The Sixth Elder’s palm stopped a foot from Shi Feng’s chest. The Elder looked up.

A crack ran across the top of the Cage, straight and black, from one side of the sky to the other.

A hammer came through it.

It was a plain black iron hammer with a short handle, and it fell straight down out of the broken sky. It struck the stream between the two of them. The ice burst upward in a white sheet, and the half-opened Severed Moon Heaven tore open along the hammer’s path.

The pressure on Shi Feng was gone. He dropped off the cliff and landed on his knees.

A man landed on the ice beside the hammer.

His travel-stained robe was muddy to the knees, with a hole in one elbow. A twig was stuck through his carelessly tied hair. In his left hand he held half a steaming roasted sweet potato. He took a bite, picked up the hammer with his right hand and rested it on his shoulder.

“Who’s bullying my Junior Brother?” Lin Langtian said, chewing. “Do you know whose Junior Brother this is?”

Shi Feng stared at his back, stunned.

He felt Lin Langtian’s aura for the first time in his life.

In Artificer Hall, Lin Langtian had shown early Nascent Soul and hidden a peak Nascent Soul beneath it. This was peak Profound Heaven, so far above the Sixth Elder’s aura that the Elder’s broken half-heaven was already shrinking away from it.

Shi Feng was too shocked to think.

The Sixth Elder was afraid. He took one step back across the ice, then another. For the first time since he’d walked out of the snow at Lower Pine, his hands weren’t folded.

“Peak Profound Heaven?” the Sixth Elder said hoarsely. “There’s no peak Profound Heaven in the north that the Heavenly Sect doesn’t know.”

“Then your sect’s records are bad,” Lin Langtian said. “That’s not Yours Truly’s fault.”

Lin Langtian didn’t turn around. He spoke over his shoulder, still chewing.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Lin Langtian said. “I told you Senior Brother was holding back.”

“…” Shi Feng didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. He knelt on the ice with blood running down his chin, looking at the twig in Lin Langtian’s hair.

“Who is that?” Tan Ershu shrieked from the clifftop. “He came out of the sky! Who comes out of the sky?”

Nobody answered him.

The Sixth Elder looked from the hammer to the crack in the dome and back again. His torn palm was shaking. Then he planted his feet on the ice and forced it still. He chose to fight.

“Whoever you are,” the Sixth Elder said coldly, “you’re standing in this elder’s basin.”

His heaven opened all the way.