Chapter 1090 — Bad Weld

CHAPTER 1090

Bad Weld

The pieces of the sky came down around Lin Langtian and fitted together.

Shi Feng watched it happen from behind Qin Wuyan’s back. A hundred li of grey dome folded in on itself, slab after slab, and closed into a small grey shell ten paces across, with Lin Langtian standing in the middle of it on the ice. The walls were so thick that the light inside went dim.

Space around it locked harder than Shi Feng had ever felt. Even breathing became an effort.

“A hundred li of array,” the Ninth Elder said, his outstretched hands shaking. “Folded into ten paces. Not even a peak Profound Heaven can break a hundred li folded into—”

“One,” Lin Langtian said from inside the shell.

Lin Langtian ignored the Ninth Elder. He turned slowly on his heel, studying the walls, with the hammer resting on his shoulder.

“Two,” Lin Langtian said.

Lin Langtian stopped, facing a spot low on the left side of the shell, a hand’s width above the ice. Shi Feng couldn’t see anything different about it.

“Three,” Lin Langtian said. “Bad weld.”

Lin Langtian swung.

The Heaven-Forging Hammer hit the shell at that one spot, and the whole Cage broke.

It didn’t crack. It broke outward from that point in a ring of grey that ran across the ice, across the cliff, across the gullies and the burned slopes and the whole of Weeping Pine Basin, a hundred li in every direction. Behind the ring, the grey was gone.

The real sky came back. It was pale and cold and full of morning light.

Shi Feng felt space let go.

He felt it in his whole body at once. All night every step he took had pushed against locked space, and now nothing pushed back. Kneeling only twenty paces from the spot, Shi Feng understood how it had happened. The whole Cage, all hundred li of it, had been tied to that one point low on the shell. Every line of the array ran back to it. When the point broke, nothing held the rest.

Shi Feng fixed it in his memory. Of everything he’d seen in the basin, it mattered most.

The Ninth Elder’s whole body jerked.

He had built the Cage, and he had tied himself into it to hold it up. When its heart broke, his broke too. Blood came out of his eyes, his ears and his mouth all at once. He looked down at his own hands. Then he fell forward onto the ice and didn’t move again.

“Ancestors!” Tan Ershu screamed from the clifftop. “The other one’s dead! He just fell over dead! Heaven’s net is wide, but nothing slips through it!”

The Sixth Elder didn’t look at the body.

He was standing alone on the stream now, with blood running from under his mask and his torn palm pressed to his chest. Shi Feng could feel his inner heaven through the air. It was cracked straight through, the same as Wanyan Bo’s had been, and it was still cracking.

Above Lin Langtian, a little of the red sky was still open. Under it, far away and very faint, the hammering went on.

The Sixth Elder stared up at it in dread. His hand fell away from his chest.

“I know that sky,” the Sixth Elder said. His voice had gone thin and old. “I saw it once, when I was an apprentice. It was in a painting, in the sect’s oldest hall. The Furnace Lord.”

He said the name slowly, with difficulty.

“Nobody has said that name for three thousand years,” the Sixth Elder said.

Lin Langtian lowered the hammer.

Lin Langtian was silent for a long moment, and he wasn’t grinning. He looked at the Sixth Elder’s mask, tired and sad.

“He died,” Lin Langtian said very quietly. “I’m his much better-looking replacement.”

The Sixth Elder backed away one step, then another.

Qin Wuyan raised his good hand a few inches, ready to stop him. Lin Langtian shook his head once, without looking at him.

“Go,” Lin Langtian said to the Sixth Elder.

The Sixth Elder tore a rift in the air with his good hand. Space was free now, and it opened at once, a black line taller than a man. He looked at Lin Langtian one last time, and then at Shi Feng, still on his knees behind Qin Wuyan. Then he stepped through, and the rift closed after him.

Shi Feng stared at the place where it had been, bewildered.

He couldn’t understand the choice. With his inner heaven cracked, the mid Profound Heaven Elder could have been killed easily. He was also the one man who now knew a name the Heavenly Sect would want to hear.

“Why?” Shi Feng asked hoarsely. “He’ll tell them.”

Lin Langtian didn’t answer.

The red sky over him went out all at once, without fading, and the far-off hammering stopped.

Lin Langtian sat down on the ice.

He did it slowly and carefully, the hammer across his knees. Then he coughed, and blood came out of his mouth, a great deal of it, bright red on the grey ice. He coughed again, and there was more.

“Senior Brother!” Shi Feng said in alarm, trying to get up. His legs wouldn’t hold him.

“Don’t fuss,” Lin Langtian said, wiping his mouth on the sleeve with the hole in it. His hand was shaking. “Senior Brother’s resting. Senior Brother is allowed to rest. It’s in the sect charter.”

Qin Wuyan stood very still between them, looking at Lin Langtian. For the first time since Shi Feng had known him, Qin Wuyan looked uncertain.

Lin Langtian looked across the ice at the half sweet potato, lying frozen in the snow where the Severed Moon had left it.

“And Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said, coughing once more, “you owe me a sweet potato.”