Chapter 1089 — Two Skies

CHAPTER 1089

Two Skies

The stream was gone. So were the cliff, the pines and the grey dome.

There was only a flat grey plain running to every horizon, and over it a broken moon, very large and very close. The crack Shi Feng’s stroke had put in it the night before was still there, a black line across its face.

This was the Severed Moon Heaven, open in full. Everything in it obeyed one man.

“Kneel,” the Sixth Elder said.

The word came down from the whole sky at once. Shi Feng was already kneeling, and it pressed him down onto his hands. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the grey ground.

Lin Langtian yawned.

He didn’t kneel. His robe stirred a little, and that was all.

“Your heaven’s very rude,” Lin Langtian said, taking another bite of sweet potato. “Junior Brother, are you watching? This is what a small house sounds like when it shouts.”

The Sixth Elder’s palm came at him out of the sky. It wasn’t a disc of light this time. The moon itself pressed downward, and its cold fell over Lin Langtian in a pillar.

Lin Langtian stepped aside. The pillar clipped his left hand, and the sweet potato flew out of it and rolled away across the plain.

Lin Langtian looked at it. For the first time, he was angry.

“That,” Lin Langtian said flatly, “was roasted on pine charcoal for two hours.”

Lin Langtian opened his own heaven.

The sky over half the plain turned red. Under it, the grey ground turned black and hot, and anvils stood on it, row after row, to the edge of sight. A fire burned under every one. Far away in the red, someone was hammering, steady and slow, and the sound came from everywhere.

Shi Feng lifted his head in astonishment.

Two skies hung over him. Grey met red straight above his head, and the line between them was moving toward the grey.

Shi Feng understood what he was seeing. An inner heaven was a law copied from heaven and held up by one man’s strength. When two of them met, the stronger law pushed the weaker one out.

Lin Langtian lifted the Heaven-Forging Hammer.

“This is for the potato,” Lin Langtian said loudly, swinging. “Yours Truly watched those coals for two hours.”

The hammer didn’t hit the Elder. It hit the sky.

The broken moon was pulled down out of the grey onto the nearest anvil. Lin Langtian struck it. It went flat along one edge, and the black crack in its face spread to the rim.

“This is for my junior brother,” Lin Langtian said, striking again. “Nobody pins him to a cliff while I’m watching.”

The moon went flat along the other edge. The Sixth Elder screamed and clutched his chest. Every blow to his moon struck him too.

“And the hole in my robe,” Lin Langtian said, striking a third time. “That was there before. Yours Truly is blaming you anyway.”

The moon broke in half on the anvil.

The grey plain broke with it. The two skies vanished together, and the stream came back, and the black cliff, and the ice under Shi Feng’s hands. The Sixth Elder stood on the ice ten paces away with blood pouring out from under his mask.

High above them, the Cage’s dome was coming apart. The crack the hammer had made had grown into a dozen cracks, and pieces of grey were breaking off and falling. Each one was a slab of locked space as wide as a house. The first one hit the far bank and crushed thirty pines flat without a sound.

Then the air beside the Sixth Elder split open in a straight seam, and a second masked man stepped out of it.

It was the Ninth Elder. His grey robe was scorched across the chest, and his hands were already moving through the Locked Sky Seal. The seam he’d come out of was the sealed fold, and he was leaving it open behind him.

Shi Feng understood that the Ninth Elder had released Qin Wuyan to save the Sixth Elder.

The Locked Sky Seal closed around Lin Langtian. For half a breath the air around him turned solid and grey, and the Ninth Elder caught the Sixth Elder by the collar and dragged him back three paces.

Qin Wuyan came out of the fold behind them.

He was bleeding from the scalp and the mouth, and his left arm hung straight down at his side, broken in at least two places. He ignored the Elders and Lin Langtian. He crossed the ice to Shi Feng in four long steps and stood in front of him.

A slab of falling grey came down toward them both.

Qin Wuyan raised his good hand. Still Mountain Seal stopped the slab six feet above his head. It hung there, grinding, then slid off to one side and smashed into the stream.

“This one is late,” Qin Wuyan said, without turning round.

“You held him off for a whole night,” Shi Feng said from the ice, barely above a whisper. “Thank you.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing. He was ashamed of coming so late. He stayed where he was, with his broken arm hanging, and lifted his good hand again as the next slab came down.

Across the stream, Lin Langtian broke the Locked Sky Seal with a shrug. The grey around him cracked and fell off his shoulders in pieces.

“A mantis trying to stop a chariot,” Lin Langtian said, brushing grey dust off his sleeve.

The Ninth Elder knew the seal wouldn’t hold him. He chose to use the whole Cage instead, spreading both hands toward the falling sky.

“Then the Cage,” the Ninth Elder said.

Every broken piece of the dome stopped in the air. Then, all at once, they started coming back together around Lin Langtian.