Chapter 329 — Iron Fist on the Dock

CHAPTER 329

Iron Fist on the Dock

By dusk six hundred people crowded the south dock. Nobody was interested in crossing while the fight was about to begin.

Lanterns hung from every post. Merchants stood on crates. Black Water men sat in their reed boats rocking at the pier, in neat rows, with their plaques on their arms and their faces carefully empty. Tang Hai stood in the front boat with his arms folded. He hadn't said a word since sunset.

Bao Kun stepped onto the planks and rolled his shoulders. His twelve disciples spread out behind him in a half circle.

“Last chance, boy,” Bao Kun said. “Kneel, apologise and pay the toll for this month. I'll let you keep your legs.”

“Say it again after,” Shi Feng said.

He took the Sword off his back and let the cloth fall. The grey blade came out broad and dull and thick, without a single decoration. A few merchants laughed.

“What is that?”

“A butcher's cleaver?”

“A flat piece of iron!”

“…”

Bao Kun didn't laugh. He lifted his right fist. Gold-brown qi ran down his arm, and the knuckles turned the colour of old iron. The planks under his boots creaked.

“Iron Fist Gate, Iron Palm Art,” Bao Kun said. “Golden Core-grade, Major Success. Come.”

Shi Feng came.

His Drifting Ash Step was clumsy, and he let it be clumsy. He crossed four paces and cut low with Ember Rain Sword. Red sparks sprayed across the dock and fell in a thin curtain. Bao Kun walked straight through them, and the sparks died against his robe.

Then the palm came.

The palm drove straight toward him, without any wasted movement. The Sword came up to meet it. There was a sound like a hammer hitting an anvil, and Shi Feng's arm went numb from fingertips to shoulder.

He flew backward off the dock.

The Jinsha closed over his head, brown and cold. He kicked, found the surface, and spat river out of his mouth. Above him the crowd was shouting.

“He's down!”

“One palm!”

“Sect of paupers!”

“Elder Bao, finish him! When pulling weeds, pull out the roots!”

Shi Feng dragged himself up the ladder. The Sword was heavier wet. The embers on its edge had gone out, and when he tried to light them again, the qi in his core answered too slowly. Three parts in a hundred. He had known that already. Now he felt it.

Bao Kun waited at the top, with hands on his hips.

“Again?” Bao Kun asked, making no effort to hide his contempt.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said.

He tried the Iron River Sword Art next. He cut straight, in the clean, flat line he had practised a thousand times on the post in the Pagoda. Bao Kun caught the blade between two palms. The steel rang, and the shock ran through both arms, leaving his fingers numb.

“A sword without fire,” Bao Kun said in his ear. “What's it for?”

He threw Shi Feng off the dock, sideways.

The river hit him again. This time, there was a wooden piling below the surface. His left foot struck it and twisted. His ankle cracked against the submerged piling. Sharp pain shot through his left leg.

He surfaced, gasping.

“That was his ankle!”

“I heard it from here!”

“It's over.”

“Poor boy… a mantis trying to stop a cart.”

From the pier above, Sima Lan's voice came very flat.

“Shi Feng,” Sima Lan called, leaning forward to see him below the pier.

“I'm here,” Shi Feng said, clinging to the piling.

“I'm not asking you to stop,” Sima Lan said. “I'm asking where you've put your boots.”

“On the dock,” Shi Feng replied, still clinging to the piling.

“Then take them off before you fall in again,” Sima Lan said. “You don’t need more weight dragging you down.”

He almost laughed. It hurt.

On the pier, Bao Kun walked along the edge, looking down at him. His voice carried across the water. “Stay down, boy. I won't ask a third time.”

Shi Feng didn't answer. He counted.

Two exchanges so far, and he had replayed both. Each time, Bao Kun breathed out on the hit, a short hard sound, and did not move his front foot. Bao Kun relied on a rooted stance. His Iron Palm Art was strong, but he turned slowly once his weight settled over the front foot. Qi gathered in the hand for the full length of a heartbeat before it landed.

Shi Feng looked up the length of the pier. The reed boats were rocking against their ropes. Tang Hai's men had stopped pretending to be calm. They were watching him. Not Bao Kun. Him.

One of the men quietly asked Tang Hai which side they were on.

“Wait,” Tang Hai said.

Another man muttered that Shi Feng was finished.

“Wait,” Tang Hai ordered, refusing to look away from Shi Feng.

Another man suggested taking Elder Bao’s boats while he was busy.

“I said wait!” Tang Hai snapped.

The silence on the water was strange. Eighty men were looking at a boy with a broken ankle, hanging off a rotten piling, and trying to work out whether this was the moment the river changed hands.

On the dock, Lin Langtian had stopped chewing. The sweet potato hung in the air halfway to his mouth. Sima Lan's fingers had gone white on her ledger. She didn't move.

Shi Feng drew a breath that tasted of mud.

He thought, I can't match his hand. I can't outlast it. The palm lands once per heartbeat, always the same way, and he never moves his front foot. If I pull that foot aside while he strikes, he won’t recover in time.

He looked at the rope tied to the piling in front of his face, the thick, tarred mooring line the ferry used for the heaviest barges. It ran up into the dark above him, to a bollard just beyond Bao Kun's left boot.

He took the rope in his hand.

Then he pulled himself up the ladder, one-legged, with the Sword hanging from his belt, and stood on the dock again, with the river streaming off his robe. His left foot hung at a bad angle. He put no weight on it.

“You’re still standing?” Bao Kun demanded, startled by his return.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said. “Again.”