Chapter 1119 — Early Profound Heaven

CHAPTER 1119

Early Profound Heaven

Shi Feng opened his eyes.

The abode’s heart looked the same as before. The worn lines covered the floor, with three empty jade cases, one full case and the dried blood from the first fold. Grey snow light came down the passage.

But everything inside Shi Feng had changed.

Shi Feng had reached early Profound Heaven. He was relieved, and for a moment he only breathed.

It didn’t feel like any breakthrough before it. Every earlier one had brought more qi, more filled meridians and a wider sea. This time a new place had opened inside him. A whole sky lay below his dantian, with its own ground, sun, rivers and stars, and its own early winter. When he turned his attention to it, it was there. When he turned away, it went on without him. Its wind still blew from the northwest.

It was alive. Nobody but him could measure it, and nobody ever would.

Shi Feng stood up carefully, testing his legs. They held. His meridians still hurt, and the first fold had torn open the band below his ribs again, but his qi moved through it differently now. It no longer came only from his sea. It came from his own sky, and his own sky was very large.

He walked down the passage to the doorway.

Lin Langtian was still sitting on the doorstep in the snow. He looked up as Shi Feng came out and said nothing for a moment. He studied Shi Feng slowly from head to foot, and Shi Feng knew he was trying to see past the aura.

Lin Langtian couldn’t. Nobody could see into another man’s inner heaven from outside.

“Early Profound Heaven,” Lin Langtian said at last.

“Early Profound Heaven,” Shi Feng agreed.

Lin Langtian got to his feet and brushed the snow off his robe. His hand still shook from the basin.

“Do you know what you just did?” Lin Langtian said. “You opened an inner heaven hurt, in a ruin, in one night, and heaven came down to look at it and went away again. The whole north saw that cloud. Half of them are going to say it was an omen, and the other half are going to say it was you, and the second half will be right.” He shook his head. “Three days apart, and you have to look at a man with new eyes.”

“Pinefall saw it?” Shi Feng asked.

“Pinefall saw it. The Wanyan estate saw it. I’d bet the herders on the frozen waste saw it,” Lin Langtian said. Then he lowered his voice. “Junior Brother. What did you put in it?”

Shi Feng looked at him.

He thought of the ground and the sun, the pillar and the rivers. He thought of the bolt that had hung over the pagoda for two breaths.

Shi Feng chose not to answer. What lay inside his heaven would stay his secret, even from Lin Langtian.

Lin Langtian waited. Then he laughed softly and shook his head.

“Good,” Lin Langtian said. “That’s the right answer. That’s the only right answer. If you’d told me, I’d have had to hit you.”

Qin Wuyan came in from the snow. He stopped in front of Shi Feng and studied him for a while, his old face still. Then he bowed.

It was the guardian’s bow he gave Shi Feng every morning. This time it went deeper. Qin Wuyan was showing his respect for the new realm.

Shi Feng was moved. He saw the difference, but he didn’t mention it, and neither did Qin Wuyan.

Since the day the Pavilion stamped his 6 Mark, he had been the one exception in the world. Every alchemist in the Empire knew the rule: a 6 Mark stood at Profound Heaven. The only others who had ever broken that rule were legends, and they were all dead. Until today, the one living 6 Mark below Profound Heaven had been him.

Now that exception was gone.

“The Pavilion will be very annoyed,” Lin Langtian said cheerfully. “They’d only just got used to you being impossible. Now you’re just rare.”

“The Pavilion will be pleased,” Qin Wuyan said calmly.

“That’s what I said,” Lin Langtian said.

Shi Feng flexed his left hand. For the first time since Pinefall, it closed tight and fast without his watching it. The qi from his inner heaven had reached the arm without being sent. The arm wasn’t healed, but Shi Feng was glad to have it under his control again.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said. “How long until they come?”

“By the men’s pace, tonight. By the Elder’s, sooner,” Qin Wuyan said. “This one will go down to the valley mouth.”

Qin Wuyan bowed again, as deeply as before, and walked down the valley through the snow without looking back.

Lin Langtian sat back down on the doorstep and fished a cold sweet potato out of his robe.

“Go and sit, Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said. “A new sky needs settling, and you won’t get another quiet hour today. Senior Brother will mind the door.”

Shi Feng went back into the abode’s heart and sat down among the worn lines.

He turned his attention inward and let the new sky settle. He walked its pale ground in his mind and felt it hold. He followed the rivers to the ice at their edges. The pagoda stood quietly under its covering of mountain. Everything was where he had put it.

Less than an hour later, the valley rang.

The sound came from the forty-nine rim stones Lin Langtian had woken by hand. A single long, deep note went round the whole valley and kept humming. Snow shook loose from the pines. The array’s thin grey light flared along the rim and stayed lit.

From the valley mouth, Qin Wuyan’s voice came up the snow, flat and clear.

“He is here,” Qin Wuyan said.

Shi Feng opened his eyes. Through the array he could feel a mid Profound Heaven presence standing in the valley mouth, surrounded by the cold, broken light of a moon.

The Sixth Elder had come.