Chapter 300 — It Held

CHAPTER 300

It Held

The ninth bolt didn't fall like the others.

It descended slowly, a pillar of white fire as wide as the cliff, and the dark layer behind it watched every inch of the way. The heat reached Shi Feng first. His eyebrows were already gone, and now the skin on his face began to blister.

He didn't run. There was nowhere to run to.

Shi Feng thought, Three hundred and sixty-five meridians. Every bone in me is gold. If this body is worth anything, this is where it shows.

He sat down again, straightened his back and opened every gate he had.

The bolt struck.

White fire filled his skull, spine, and all three hundred and sixty-five meridians. Shi Feng lost sight of the cliff around him. His golden bones rang under the force, from his legs to his smallest finger joints. He kept drawing the lightning in.

The Physique drank.

It drank until it was full, and then it kept drinking. The pain went past anything Shi Feng had a word for. Somewhere in the middle of it he realised he was shouting, and that nobody on earth could have heard him.

Down in his dantian, something small and hard began to turn.

“Nine,” He Zhen said.

Nobody on the slope breathed.

The white light was too bright to look at. It had swallowed the cliff top, and the roar was still rolling across the valley. Smoke rose in a straight line to the clouds, and the clouds themselves were slowly folding back on each other.

“Is he...” a girl began.

“Shh!”

“Nobody could survive that.”

“Nobody has ever been hit by nine like that.”

“Twelve stones on survive,” Wu Qiang whispered, frightened. “I put twelve on him, and I’m supposed to pay everybody else too!”

“Be quiet!” He Zhen snapped.

The light thinned. The smoke thinned. The black layer in the sky slid slowly shut, like an eyelid.

Then the clouds drew apart, and a plain afternoon sun fell on the sect.

On the cliff, a man was sitting in a crater of glass.

Shi Feng sat in the glass crater, his skin black and cracked. His hair was burnt to stubble. Gold light pulsed beneath the burns. He felt his heart beat, then a slower pulse below his navel. The new core had held.

He opened his eyes.

It held.

“He's alive!” a boy screamed.

“He's alive! He's sitting up! Survive a great calamity, and fortune follows!”

“The Foundation Establishment tribulation is finished!”

“That wasn't a Foundation Establishment tribulation, you idiot!”

The slope exploded. Outer-court disciples were hugging each other and strangers. The pool-keeper had started to cry. Cui Hong dropped his arrival board and nobody picked it up. Zhu Liu stood stiff as a post with tears running down his face and said in a small voice, “I'm... the receipt... I'm going to need a very large receipt.”

“Five hundred and forty stones,” Sima Lan said quietly.

“What?” Zhu Liu said.

“Mu Er’s winnings,” Sima Lan said, watching the cliff instead of Zhu Liu. “Nine to one. Be quiet; you’ll get the money.” Her hand stayed pressed over her heart. She wasn’t thinking about the odds anymore.

On the cliff, Shi Feng looked down at his hands.

They were black and cracked, but they closed when he told them to. He looked inward. In the dark of his dantian, a core turned slowly, round as a pearl and the colour of old gold. It was bigger than it should have been. It was also very empty.

[Core: formed | Grade: Unknown | Fill: 0%]

He didn't know what that meant. He knew only that the sky had measured him and gone away without saying a word.

“Hurry, hurry!” Elder Tian Luo was shouting. Two disciples were helping him up the cliff path, one under each arm, and in his hand he carried a flat piece of white grading jade. “Make way! The grading must be witnessed. Core grade is read at the moment of formation!”

Shi Feng was too tired to stand, so he waited. The elder reached him, panting, knelt beside the crater and pressed the jade to the centre of Shi Feng's chest.

The jade should have glowed. It should have shown False, or Flawed, or Flawless. The very best cores in the kingdom made it shine with Supreme.

The jade stayed white.

Elder Tian Luo turned it over, rubbed it on his sleeve and pressed it again. Nothing happened. It was a blank white tablet, as plain as the day it was carved.

“It's broken,” Elder Tian Luo said.

“Is it?” Shi Feng asked. His voice was a croak.

“It must be broken. I tested it this morning,” Tian Luo said, staring between jade and disciple. His beard trembled. “No. There’s no mark for this. This jade doesn’t have a word for what you are.”

“Then write whatever's easiest,” Shi Feng said, and lay back in the glass, and let the sun warm his face.

He was asleep before the elder answered.