Chapter 1108 — Forty Exchanges

CHAPTER 1108

Forty Exchanges

The first fist was light.

Mu Hanzhi crossed ten paces in two steps and punched straight at Shi Feng’s chest. It was a plain punch, fast and clean, with no more force behind it than a strong Shattering Void cultivator’s first blow. Shi Feng caught it on the flat of the grey Sword, testing its weight, and the fist rang off the steel.

The second was a little heavier. The third was heavier than that.

By the fifth, Shi Feng’s right wrist ached.

“Hundred Marrow Fist,” Mu Hanzhi said, without stopping. “The Master will have noticed.”

Shi Feng understood the art. Every punch that landed on something, flesh or blade or stone, left its force stored in the marrow of Mu Hanzhi’s bones. The next punch released that force along with its own. The fifth fist carried five blows. The tenth would carry ten.

Every block made the next fist heavier. Mu Hanzhi didn’t need tricks. He only needed to keep hitting.

The sixth fist came at his left side, at the broken ribs. Shi Feng caught it on the flat of the sword and gave a step to soften it. The jolt still ran up his arm into his chest, and five bound ribs ground together under the cloth.

Shi Feng gave another step under the seventh.

He looked for a way off the line. Riverless Step walked on anything that flowed, and the threshing floor was beaten earth, dry and hard. There was no water and no smoke, and the noon air was dead still. Void-Crossing Step would put him a hand’s width wrong, and a hand’s width wrong against the tenth of the Tianxing meant a fist in the ribs with seven blows in it.

Shi Feng chose to keep blocking. He had qi for one spatial step at most, and he wouldn’t spend it until it could end the fight.

Eleven. Twelve. Fourteen. Each fist was heavier than the last, and each one came at his left side. Mu Hanzhi wasn’t cruel. A proper exchange of pointers tested an opponent’s weakness.

By the twentieth exchange Shi Feng had given fifteen paces, and the crowd had started to turn.

“He’s going backwards!”

“Of course he is! Look at him, he’s holding his side!”

“The tenth hasn’t even broken a sweat!”

“I put three silver on the sixth!” a hunter shouted up at the millet stack, where Lin Langtian sat with his ledger. “Can I take it back?”

“No refunds!” Lin Langtian shouted back. His brush was moving very fast. “But Senior Brother will gladly take another three on the tenth!”

The twenty-fourth fist hit the sword so hard that the flat of the blade struck Shi Feng’s own shoulder. The twenty-fifth turned him half round. He came back to face the twenty-sixth with blood at the corner of his mouth.

The twenty-seventh fist carried twenty-six blows in it. Shi Feng caught it, and the ground under his heels cracked in a ring. The thirtieth drove him back three paces in one blow. By the thirty-third, there were only a few paces of packed earth left behind him before the edge of the floor.

The thirty-fourth came. Shi Feng turned it aside instead of catching it, to see where the stored force went. Mu Hanzhi’s fist went past his hip into the threshing floor. The beaten earth didn’t crack. It burst. A hole as wide as a cartwheel opened in the floor, and the people sitting on the near rim fell over backwards into the people behind them.

“The floor! He punched a hole in the floor!”

“With one fist? That earth’s been beaten flat for a hundred years!”

“That’s not one fist! That’s thirty fists!”

On the granary roof, Qin Wuyan kept his face turned up to the sky. He was watching the presence above the town, not the fight.

Shi Feng caught the thirty-fifth on the flat. The thirty-sixth. The blade was humming in his hand now, and his right arm was numb to the elbow. He couldn’t feel his left side at all. He was breathing through his teeth. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Each block shook his ribs a little further apart.

Shi Feng blocked the thirty-ninth, then the fortieth.

The fortieth fist struck the grey Sword dead centre, and the shock went through him from the wrist to the heels. For a moment the threshing floor went white.

When it cleared, he was still standing, and the crowd had gone quiet.

Shi Feng had blocked forty times. Forty blows were stored in Mu Hanzhi’s bones, and every one of them was waiting to come out in the next fist.

On top of the millet stack, Lin Langtian had stopped writing. He was frightened for his Junior Brother. His brush hung over the ledger, dripping ink.

Mu Hanzhi drew his right fist back to his hip. The bones in his arm creaked under what was stored in them. Forty exchanges’ worth of force gathered behind his knuckles, and the dust on the threshing floor lifted around his feet.

“Forty-first,” Mu Hanzhi said quietly.

Shi Feng set his heels in the cracked earth and raised the grey Sword one more time.