Chapter 1105 — The Bandits of Pinefall

CHAPTER 1105

The Bandits of Pinefall

The square was burning, and nobody was stealing anything.

Shi Feng saw that first, from the herb house steps at the head of the second street. Thirty men in fur hoods and bandit rags were going through the market, kicking over stalls and throwing torches into the fur bales. A salt seller’s cash box lay split open on the stones with silver spilling out of it, and three of them walked straight past it.

“They’re not taking the silver!” someone shouted from a doorway.

“What kind of bandits don’t take silver?”

“The kind that want something else!”

Two men stood apart from the rest. One was thin, in a wolf-fur coat, with long fingers bent like hooks and stained black to the knuckle. He was late Shattering Void. The other was broad and bald, and he leaned on the well in the middle of the square with his arms folded, watching. His aura was peak Shattering Void, and he didn’t bother hiding it.

On the roof above Shi Feng, Qin Wuyan had not moved.

“The presence has come down to the clouds,” Qin Wuyan said quietly. “If this one leaves the roof, it comes down too.”

“Then stay on the roof,” Shi Feng said.

He came down the steps into the square with the grey Sword in his right hand and his left arm strapped to his chest. Half his qi. One good arm. A hand’s width of error in every step through space.

Lin had climbed onto the herb house roof beside Qin Wuyan. He stood at the edge with his hands on his hips and shouted at the top of his voice.

“Hey! You! The one with the claws!” Lin Langtian yelled. “Do you know whose Junior Brother that is? Lay one finger on him and Senior Brother will skin you and sell your hide in this very market! At a discount!”

The thin man glanced at the roof and sneered. Lin Langtian’s weak aura convinced him the threat was empty.

“Young alchemist with the bad arm,” the thin man said, turning to Shi Feng. “This one is Jie Lisheng. Come along quietly, and the market stops burning.”

“Put the fires out first,” Shi Feng said. “Then we can talk about who’s coming quietly.”

“That isn’t how this works,” Jie Lisheng said, and spread his fingers. “Hook-Shadow Net.”

Grey cords sprang from his ten fingertips and spread through the air, crossing and knotting into a net ten paces wide, studded with hooks. It swept across the square at chest height. Where a cord brushed a stall pole, the pole didn’t break. Half of it simply went into the fold, and the other half fell over. Each cord was a line of folded space, and whatever it touched, it snagged and tore away.

Shi Feng checked the net’s folds. Blocking with his sword would let the cords snag the blade. He needed to get above it first.

Shi Feng looked at the smoke instead.

It was pouring off the burning fur bales and rolling across the square in the wind, thick and grey, flowing. Riverless Step at Perfection walked on anything that flowed. He put his foot on the smoke and stepped up onto it, and the net swept beneath his boots with a ripping sound.

The crowd in the doorways went silent.

“He’s walking on the smoke!”

“On the smoke? Are you blind? There’s nothing under him!”

Jie Lisheng’s eyes narrowed. He closed his left fist, and the net beneath Shi Feng folded upward and began to close. At the same moment his right hand flicked, and a second net came in from the side, low and fast, to meet the first.

Cords closed above, below and to his left. Shi Feng stopped trying to walk clear and searched for a thin seam between them.

Shi Feng reached for a seam between the cords, where the folded space ran thin, and used Void-Crossing Step.

The seam was a hand’s width from where he’d felt it.

He came through, but a hook caught his left sleeve on the way. It tore the cloth away and the skin of his shoulder with it, and he landed on the edge of the well eight paces from Jie Lisheng with blood running down his strapped arm. The bald man by the well didn’t even step aside.

“You’re slower than they said,” Jie Lisheng said.

“I’m hurt,” Shi Feng said. “They should have said that too.”

He was looking at the cords. Every one of them ran back to Jie Lisheng’s hands. The net wasn’t thrown and let go. It was held, all ten fingers hooked into it. That was why his fingers were bent. The net’s force came out of his hands, and any force that came out of them could go back into them.

Jie Lisheng raised both hands. The two nets rose and came together over the square into one great net, and it dropped toward the well.

Shi Feng didn’t cut the cords. He cut between them, with Sunset-Splitting Sword.

The grey Sword drew a line through the air, red-gold, and everything the line passed through divided into two clean halves. At Perfection it didn’t need to touch the cords. It cut the knots where they crossed. One knot split, then four, then nine, in one long stroke from the bottom of the net to the top.

Each split knot let its fold spring open. Each fold that sprang open threw its pull back down the cords, and every cord ran to the same ten fingers.

Jie Lisheng understood a breath too late. He tried to open his hands.

He couldn’t release his grip. His own hooks had fixed the net to his fingers.

The whole net snapped back to its owner. It wrapped round him from head to foot, cords tightening, folding him into itself, and he screamed once. Then the cords fell slack on the stones. Jie Lisheng lay inside them, folded at angles a man’s body doesn’t bend, in front of the whole market, and he didn’t move again.

The square was quiet except for the fires.

“The captain… the captain’s dead!”

“Caught in his own net! Heaven has eyes!”

“That young man is bleeding, and he only used one arm!”

“…”

On the roof, Lin Langtian threw both fists into the air.

“Did you see that?” Lin Langtian roared. “That’s Yours Truly’s Junior Brother! Who’s next? Come on, who’s next?”

The bald man by the well unfolded his arms.

He pushed himself off the stones and looked down at Jie Lisheng’s body, folded up in the grey cords, and he didn’t seem upset by it at all.

“Jie always did love that net,” the bald man said. “This one is Shan Ping.”

His peak Shattering Void aura came down over the square, and the bandits who had been backing away stopped backing away.

Shan Ping lifted one open palm. He didn’t strike yet. He only held it up, and a low ringing came out of the air around it, one faint, far-off bell note.

Inside Shi Feng’s chest, his three cracked ribs began to ring with it.