Chapter 1117 — Folding Inward

CHAPTER 1117

Folding Inward

The first fold collapsed in less than a breath.

Shi Feng had started simply. Void-Crossing Step folded space outside him, a hand’s width or a body-length, and stepped him through it. To open an inner heaven, he had to turn the same art back on itself: fold the space inside his own body, below his dantian, and keep folding it inward until there was room in there that had never existed before.

He swallowed the first Heaven-Mirror Pill, felt it settle cool and bright in his chest, and folded.

The space below his dantian bent. For an instant there was a gap in him, no bigger than a closed fist, and it was empty and dark and his.

Then it snapped shut.

The force of the closing burst through his body and struck the weakest part of it, the scorched band of meridians below his ribs. He felt them tear. Blood came up into his mouth. He bent forward over his knees and coughed red onto the old carved lines, and for a while his vision went black.

“Junior Brother!” Lin Langtian’s voice came from the passage. “Was that you?”

“It was me,” Shi Feng said, when he could speak. “Stay at the door.”

“Did it work?” Lin Langtian asked.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

There was a short silence in the passage.

“Did it hurt?” Lin Langtian asked.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said.

“Good. If it didn’t hurt, you’d be doing it wrong,” Lin Langtian said. His footsteps went back toward the doorway. He was worried, and his cheerful voice didn’t hide it.

Shi Feng wiped his mouth and sat up straight, angry at his own haste.

He understood what he’d done wrong. He’d folded the space the way he always folded it outside, quickly, in one movement, the way Void-Crossing Step was meant to work. Outside, a fold only had to last the instant it took to step through. This one had to last for the rest of his life. A fold that was meant to stay open had to be made slowly and anchored as it was made, or it would spring shut the moment he let go.

The first pill was spent. Its steadying had gone into holding his body together while the fold collapsed.

He opened the second jade case and swallowed the second Heaven-Mirror Pill. Then he began again from nothing, and this time he went slowly.

He folded the space below his dantian by a hair’s width and stopped. He held it there. When it stopped trying to spring back, he pinned it with a thread of qi and folded it by another hair. Then another. He kept the rhythm he used for refining, nine beats and a rest. It was the slowest work he had ever done.

An hour went by. Then two.

The gap in him grew to the size of a fist, then a room. It held.

Shi Feng was relieved, but he didn’t stop. He laid the walls first, as he’d designed them, out of folded space turned inward, layer on layer, until the edge of the dark room was firm under his attention. Then he began to fill it.

He laid down his foundation for the ground. It spread out under the dark, and its grade, which no one had ever been told, set into the floor of the new space and made it solid. He lifted his core for a sun. It rose slowly over the new ground and lit it for the first time, pale gold. The space was no longer the size of a room. It had a horizon.

Then he raised the pillar.

The Nine-layer pagoda stood up in the middle of the plain, layer on layer, until its ninth roof touched the sky he’d built. The whole space settled around it. With a pillar to hold it up, the sky could be larger, and it expanded on its own.

Last came the rivers. Three hundred and sixty-five meridians ran out from his body into the new ground, and each one became water. They crossed the plain in every direction, joining and splitting, and wherever they ran the ground turned green.

Shi Feng looked at what he had made and was alarmed. It kept growing.

Lin Langtian had said a courtyard for most people and a valley for the good ones. This was already past a valley. The horizon kept stepping back. The rivers kept finding new ground to cross. He wasn’t pushing it. The things he’d put into it were too big for a valley, and the space was making room for them.

Shi Feng chose to let it grow. Stopping it would mean folding it smaller, and a forced fold could snap shut as the first one had.

Near dawn it slowed, and then it was still.

He couldn’t see the far edge. He could only feel it, a long way off, firm and whole.

Behind him, in the passage, he heard Lin Langtian get up.

“Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said, sounding shaken. “What did you put in there?”

Shi Feng didn’t answer. He was listening to something else.

Far above the abode, above the mountain and the valley rim and the snow, something very large had just turned its attention toward the northern mountains. Shi Feng felt it at the back of his neck and went tense. It wasn’t hostile yet. It was only curious.

At the cave mouth, Qin Wuyan spoke for the first time in hours.

“The sky,” Qin Wuyan said.