Chapter 1118 — Heaven’s Looking

CHAPTER 1118

Heaven’s Looking

The clouds came over the valley at dawn, black and low and turning.

Shi Feng sat in the abode’s heart with his eyes shut and his new sky spread out inside him. He felt the clouds gather through his Spirit Sense. They came from every direction at once and piled up over Cold Pine valley in a slow wheel, layer on layer, until the light in the passage behind him went grey and then went out.

In the doorway, Lin Langtian stood up from his crate.

“Heaven’s looking,” Lin Langtian said grimly.

Thirty li to the south, Pinefall saw it too.

The herb-house manager was opening his shutters when the street went dark. He looked up in alarm and saw a black wheel of cloud standing over the northern mountains, wider than the whole valley under it, with lightning moving deep inside it and not coming out.

“Tribulation clouds!” someone shouted in the street. “Look north! Somebody’s calling down a tribulation!”

“Over the mountains? Who’d be up there?”

“Who do you think? The young alchemist went up that way with the two old men!”

“That’s no pill tribulation. I’ve seen a pill tribulation. That’s…”

“…”

The whole street stood with their faces turned north, and nobody went back inside.

In the abode’s heart, Shi Feng swallowed the third Heaven-Mirror Pill and began to copy the sky.

Shi Feng understood the test. Heaven passed over what looked like itself. If his inner heaven was a true copy of the heaven above it, then when heaven looked, it would see only itself. Any piece he left out was a gap, and heaven struck at gaps.

Shi Feng chose to start with what was above him.

He reached up through the rock with his Spirit Sense, past the abode and the valley rim and the black wheel of cloud, to the real sky over the northern mountains. Then he copied it into his own, one piece at a time.

First, the stars. It was day outside, but the stars were still there behind the light. He found them one by one and set each one into his own sky in its place, so that his dark held the same stars as the dark above the mountains. There were thousands. He didn’t hurry, though his meridians ached under the strain.

Next, the wind. The real wind over the valley came from the northwest, cold and dry and steady. He made his wind come from the same quarter at the same strength, and when the real wind gusted, he gusted his.

Then the season. It was early winter above the mountains, so it became early winter on his plain. His rivers grew thin skins of ice at their edges. His green ground went brown and then pale. His sun sat lower in its sky.

With each piece he set in place, the wheel of cloud above the valley turned a little slower.

He could feel heaven’s attention moving over him now, slowly, searching. It passed over his ground and found ground. It passed over his rivers and found winter rivers. It passed over his stars and found stars it already knew.

Then it came to the pagoda.

There was nothing above the northern mountains like the pagoda. There was nothing like it anywhere. Heaven’s attention stopped there, and in the black cloud over the valley a single bolt of lightning began to form.

Shi Feng was alarmed. He felt the bolt gather. It was thin and white and very bright, and it hung in the middle of the wheel, pointing down.

“Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said from the doorway, very quietly. “One’s forming.”

Shi Feng didn’t answer. He’d already found the gap.

Shi Feng understood that heaven had a pillar too. The real sky over the northern mountains was held up by the mountains themselves, the great old peaks around the valley that had stood under it since before any cultivator was born. He took the shape of those peaks, their snow and rock and weight, and laid it over the pagoda to hide it.

From above, the pillar in his heaven was now a mountain.

The bolt hung for one breath, then another. It didn’t fall.

Then it came apart.

It broke softly into a thousand pieces of white light, and the pieces went cold as they fell, and by the time they reached the valley they were snow. Fine, dry snow drifted down over Cold Pine valley, the abode door and the crate where Lin Langtian stood. The black wheel slowed, stopped and began to thin. Grey light came back into the passage.

No tribulation fell.

In Pinefall’s street, the crowd watched the black cloud fade over the mountains without dropping a single bolt.

“It… it went away?”

“Tribulations don’t go away!”

“Well, this one did!”

“Heaven’s will is hard to guess,” an old woman said, and went back inside to her stove.

In the doorway of the abode, Lin Langtian laughed with relief. It started small and then it got loud, a great ringing laugh that went down the valley and came back off the rim, and he laughed until he ran out of breath. Then his legs gave way, and he sat down very hard on the doorstep and stayed there with the snow falling on his hair.

“It passed,” Lin Langtian said to nobody, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Heaven looked at him, and it passed.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing, but he was clearly shaken. He stepped out from the door into the snow and looked up at the thinning sky for a long time.

Inside, Shi Feng breathed out in relief and let the last of the third pill’s qi go.

His sky was finished, and it was quiet. He could feel the wind in it, and the stars, and the cold, and every one of them matched the world above. Heaven had gone from over the valley.

There was one thing left to do, and that was to open his eyes.