Chapter 1115 — The Sixth Elder Moves

CHAPTER 1115

The Sixth Elder Moves

That night Shi Feng pushed peak Shattering Void to its limit.

He sat in the abode’s heart, a round chamber at the back of the cave with old lines worn into the floor. Lin Langtian had called it the best place to sit in the whole mountain without saying how he knew. Shi Feng took no food and no pill. He ran his qi through all three hundred and sixty-five meridians, again and again, and each circuit left it a little fuller.

The scorched band of meridians below his ribs burned at every pass. Shi Feng endured it, because stopping would waste the night’s progress.

Near the fourth hour after midnight, the qi stopped rising.

It hadn’t run out. It had reached the top. Peak Shattering Void was full, and there was nowhere left for it to go. When he pressed upward with it, he felt the wall.

He’d known about the wall since the basin. The Cage, the Severed Moon Heaven and Lin Langtian’s forge sky had all pressed on him from outside, and that pressure had worn the wall thin. Tonight he could feel it clearly for the first time. Behind it was a space that could be opened.

Shi Feng didn’t push through. He opened his eyes, breathed out and went to find the congee.

Qin Wuyan was waiting for him in the outer hall, still standing.

“Report,” Shi Feng said.

“A Profound Heaven presence, gathering a hundred li south,” Qin Wuyan said. “It is the Sixth Elder. His inner heaven is patched enough to travel. Shattering Void men with him, twenty or more. A second presence behind them, weaker. They are coming north.”

Lin Langtian sat up in his blankets by the furnace. He was worried, and for once he didn’t joke.

“How long?” Shi Feng asked.

“Two days. Three, if they are careful,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Can you hold them, Senior Qin?” Shi Feng asked.

“This one can hold the valley mouth against the men and the second presence,” Qin Wuyan said. “Not the Elder as well.”

Shi Feng sat down on the crate by the furnace and took the bowl Lin Langtian pushed at him. He’d meant to heal before opening his inner heaven, but the Sixth Elder would arrive long before his meridians mended. Shi Feng chose to open it wounded. He ate slowly, and neither of them hurried him.

“Then there are two roads,” Shi Feng said when the bowl was half empty. “The first is to run. We leave tonight by the back path, north or west, and I’m hurt the whole way. The Elder has Spirit Sense, men and a whole sky, and we have one guardian. He catches us on open ground in four or five days, and I fight a mid Profound Heaven cultivator with a torn band of meridians and one arm, on the road, with nothing at my back.”

“And the second road?” Lin Langtian asked quietly.

“I open my inner heaven here, before he comes,” Shi Feng said. “If it works, he walks into this valley and finds a Profound Heaven cultivator waiting for him, with four Heaven-Mirror Pills and an old array behind him. If it doesn’t work…” He put the bowl down. “Then I’m cracked. He finds me sitting in the abode’s heart, and Guardian Qin has to hold the door against everyone.”

“One in three never closes the crack,” Qin Wuyan said.

“And the other two remember it for the rest of their lives,” Shi Feng said. “That’s better than what waits for me on the road.”

Lin Langtian rubbed his shaking hand with the other one. He looked at the fire, and then at Shi Feng.

“You’ve already chosen,” Lin Langtian said.

“Running means fighting him on the road anyway,” Shi Feng said. “Opening means I fight him as a Profound Heaven cultivator, if it works. Either way I fight him. I’d rather fight him from here.”

“From a dead man’s house,” Lin Langtian said.

“You said you were borrowing it,” Shi Feng said. “I’m borrowing it too. Its array is the best defence we have.”

For a moment Lin Langtian looked as if he might say something about the past. Then he laughed, short and hard, and got up off his blankets.

“Fine! Fine. Senior Brother isn’t going to argue with a man who’s already made up his mind,” Lin Langtian said, brushing the ash off his knees. “Once you’re on the tiger’s back, you don’t get off halfway. But if you’re opening a heaven in my house, the house had better be awake for it. Guardian Qin, how long can you keep watch without sleeping?”

“As long as is needed,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Good answer,” Lin Langtian said.

Lin Langtian walked to the cave mouth and stood in the doorway in the blowing snow, looking up at the valley rim. The dead array stones stood half buried along it, as they had for centuries.

Shi Feng joined him and counted the stones. There were forty-nine.

“Can you wake them all?” Shi Feng asked, worried. “With your hand the way it is?”

“Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said, without looking away from the stones. “Yours Truly can do anything.”

He flexed his shaking fingers once, and then again.

“This is going to hurt,” Lin Langtian said to himself.