Chapter 389 — Eleven Days

CHAPTER 389

Eleven Days

“Day one,” Shi Feng said to the dark.

The dark didn't answer. He lay on his side in a pocket of broken stone, shorter than a coffin and not much wider. The grey Sword was jammed against his ribs. His left shoulder had gone numb. Somewhere above him, a mountain was still settling, and it groaned about it.

He was alive. That was the good news. As the saying goes, one who survives a great calamity will have good fortune afterward. He tested the stone above his shoulder, then the mass against his knees. Neither shifted. Pushing harder only drove the Sword's guard into his ribs.

He scratched a line on the stone with the Slag Weight. It cut the stone cleanly.

The lake had found him by the second sleep. A thin cold seam wept down the wall beside his head, and he drank from it through his cupped hand. He had three travel cakes in his ring, because Sima Lan had written them into the supply ledger and he'd been too tired to argue. He ate one on the third day and one on the sixth.

By the fourth scratch he began to talk.

“Day four,” Shi Feng said. “Still stuck.”

Nobody objected. He took that as agreement.

On the fifth day the ash beast woke up.

It had been buried with him, in a gap on the far side of the rubble that he hadn't noticed until it moved. It was the size of a hunting hound, with a flat grey head and a mouth full of needles. The realm's beasts ate qi, and it found his at once. He felt a thin, greedy pull at the center of his chest.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

The beast lunged. There was no room to swing a sword, so he swung his forehead.

It was a short, ugly fight in a space the width of a door. The beast bit his forearm. The Physique, which had been waiting for something it could devour, turned the bite around. The beast's qi flowed into him faster than it had flowed out. Its eyes dimmed, then closed.

[Devoured: ash beast | Gain: moderate | Note: it tried to eat first]

Shi Feng sat panting against the wall. His arm dripped. His core stirred and settled, slow and full.

“Day five,” Shi Feng said. “Dinner.”

The days after that were quiet.

He had no light, so he practiced in the dark. One art needed the work more than any other, and it was Drifting Ash Step. He had learned it at the Pagoda under three weeks of Lin Langtian's heckling. In open air, it was supposed to carry him across a floor of ash without leaving a print. It was a movement art, and movement had always been his weak spot.

Now there was no floor. There was a patch of rock the size of two bricks.

So he did it on the bricks.

He shifted his weight a finger-width, then another. He learned to lower his heel without scraping it against the wall, then to turn on the ball of his foot without striking his knee. He moved his left foot in the dark until it moved without the thought arriving first, again and again, a thousand times a day, and a thousand times more.

“So-so,” Shi Feng muttered at the end of the seventh day.

Lin Langtian would have said worse. Lin Langtian would have said it with a cushion.

On the eighth day the art let go of his feet and moved on its own. It wasn't a flash. It was a quiet click, and the footwork simply fit. The Ledger noted it flatly.

[Drifting Ash Step: Minor Success | Note: indoors]

He lay still, a little pleased and a little annoyed that it had taken a mountain.

On the ninth day he looked at the ore.

It ran in a vein across the ceiling of the pocket, grey-black and heavy, with a sheen that he recognized. It was a Grade Four ore, if he remembered the Wujin report. His belly said a great deal about that memory.

Shi Feng studied the vein for a long time.

“I know what you're thinking,” Shi Feng told the ore.

The ore stayed where it was.

“It was six days on the wagon,” Shi Feng said. “The belly rang like a bell. I can't dig and ring at the same time.”

He reached up and patted the vein once. His stomach still wanted it; he kept his hand flat against the stone until the urge passed, then went back to work.

That was the real task. He had left it for the end because it was the dullest, and because he wanted every ounce of strength he had before it began. The way out wasn't down or sideways. It was up, through forty feet of fused ash-glass and broken cliff, and the only tools he had were a plain grey Sword, a slab of slag and a body that remembered what fire tasted like.

He lit Ember Rain in the dark. It was a small orange scatter of sparks, and by its light he saw the shape of the rubble properly for the first time. The sparks melted a hole the width of his shoulder. He pushed a finger of glass out, then another. The Physique drank the heat. He cut. He crawled. He rested.

On the eleventh day his sword touched something soft.

It was cold, and it smelled of rain, and it was the first thing in eleven days that wasn't stone.

Shi Feng stopped. He put his ear to the little gap, and he heard the wind.

Then, very far away, he heard a shovel.