Chapter 420 — The Gate

CHAPTER 420

The Gate

The Heart Garden gate was a white stone arch with two jade doors, each carved with a hundred petals. It had stood for four hundred years. Today it had three people in front of it.

“Three?” Cang Hu laughed, swinging the saber off his shoulder. “Hundred Flower Valley has sent three children to hold its door!”

“Cang Hu of the Blood Lotus,” Bai Chenxi said, drawing the frost sword. “Late Golden Core. The needles are Yan Ji. The two in black are the Pan brothers.”

“You've studied us,” Cang Hu said, pleased.

“I read the Valley's file on you,” Bai Chenxi said. “It was short.”

Cang Hu's face darkened. He swung the saber.

Chang!

Frost met steel in the middle of the road. The ground whitened in a ring, and the big man was driven back three steps with ice crawling up his blade. Bai Chenxi followed. He didn't waste another word.

“That one's mine,” Ling Qingzhu said.

She was already moving. The woman in the red hood threw both fistfuls of needles at once, a hundred black threads of poison, and Ling Qingzhu's sword turned them aside in a single wide arc. The needles stuck in the road in a ring around her feet.

“Valley poison,” Yan Ji hissed. “You're sick, little fairy. I can smell it!”

“I was sick,” Ling Qingzhu said. “Now I'm only angry.”

That left the Pan brothers.

They didn't draw weapons. They stepped forward together, side by side, and put one palm each against the jade doors. Red light ran up their arms.

“Blood fire,” the elder Pan brother said. He smiled at Shi Feng. “The kind that eats flowers. Your pretty garden will burn from the roots, boy, and you won't stop us. You do not know the height of heaven or the depth of the earth. You're only early Golden Core. We can smell that too.”

“Then watch what this early Golden Core cultivator does,” Shi Feng said calmly, keeping his hand inside his sleeve.

“Do you know who we ar—” the elder Pan brother began arrogantly.

The Slag Weight hit the elder brother's chin from below. He had been looking at Shi Feng's face. He hadn't looked at the sleeve.

Crack.

The man went over backward with his mouth still open. The younger Pan brother stared at his brother, then at Shi Feng, and snarled.

“You cheat!” the younger Pan brother shouted, raising his burning palms.

“He was talking,” Shi Feng said.

But the damage was done. The blood fire had already crossed the threshold. Red flame licked up the jade doors, and every petal carved on them began to curl and blacken. Through the arch, the first seed beds trembled. A wave of heat rolled across the soil, and all the green shoots leaned away at once.

Shi Feng stepped into the archway.

He had no more time to think. The grey Sword came off his back. He raised it, and Ember Rain Sword left it in a long shower of sparks, nine, then ninety, then nine hundred embers drifting up and across the arch, hung in the air like a curtain.

The blood fire met the curtain and stopped.

It pressed. It was a Golden Core-grade fire, hungry and wet, made to eat things that were alive. The embers dimmed one by one. Shi Feng felt it through the Sword as a weight that grew heavier by the breath.

“Hold!” somebody screamed from the terrace above. “He's holding it!”

“It's not enough!” the younger Pan brother laughed, both palms glowing red. “Embers! Pretty tricks! You can't—”

Shi Feng pulled the fire from his core.

It was the core furnace's last flame. Shi Feng took it into his body at Ashen Lake and kept it beneath his dantian. Until now, he hadn't needed to release it like this. Now he sent it up his arm and into the Sword, and the embers in the arch changed colour. They went from orange to white.

The blood fire screamed. That was the only word for it.

The curtain flared, swallowed the red, and drove it back through the jade doors in a roaring flash. The Pan brother staggered. The elder brother, still on his back, grabbed his own ears.

But the fire didn't stop at the Sword.

It ran up Shi Feng's right arm and burned away his sleeve. The skin below it turned red, then black, wrist to elbow, and the smell of it reached him a moment after the pain. His Physique drank what it could.

[Devoured: blood fire | Gain: small | Note: it bites back]

He didn't let go of the Sword. If he let go, the arch would burn.

“Shi Feng!” Ling Qingzhu cried in alarm across the road.

“Mine,” Bai Chenxi said, behind him. There was ice in the word. He had put Cang Hu on his back in the road with the frost sword at his neck.

A second later, Ling Qingzhu's blade cut the red hood in half. Yan Ji fell, hands empty, and two Valley disciples ran out and threw a rope net over her head. “Heaven has eyes!” someone cried from the terrace.

The Pan brothers looked at their fallen lieutenants. They looked at the Blood Lotus disciples, three hundred men with their torches, who had stopped on the road and were not coming any closer.

“Back!” the younger Pan brother cried.

They ran.

From high above the hills, a long red streak turned and fled, trailing a curse. Lin Langtian's voice followed it, delighted.

“He's running! Hong Jue! You haven't paid! Come back and pay!” Lin Langtian shouted after the fleeing sect master.

The blood fire went out. The embers fell like slow snow. Shi Feng lowered the Sword with his left hand and let the right arm hang. He didn't look at it.

“Don't move that arm,” Ling Qingzhu said urgently.

She was beside him. She'd taken his wrist before he saw her move, and she turned it over to look at the burn. Her fingers were cold. Her hand was shaking.

“It's fine,” Shi Feng said.

“Don't say that,” Ling Qingzhu said in a low voice. “I'm not in the mood.”

Sima Lan arrived with a roll of bandage, Old Soot clinging to her collar, and stopped. She looked at the arm. For the first time since Shi Feng had met her, she said nothing at all.

“Four stones a roll,” Sima Lan said finally, holding it out. “Charged to the Valley.”

“Fine. Give it here,” Ling Qingzhu said, taking the bandage without releasing his wrist.

Sima Lan stepped back. She picked up her slate, wrote nothing on it and watched the road.

At the back of the retreating Blood Lotus crowd, a familiar figure had been abandoned by his own side and surrounded by Valley sashes. He had a torch in each hand, neither lit.

“Wait!” Captain Xue Mang shouted. “I was at the back! I didn't light anything! I told you to stop catching me!”

“I wasn't catching,” Shi Feng said. “You walked into the Valley.”

Behind him, with a crash that shook the road, Lin Langtian landed in the middle of the gate with a sweet potato in his hand and not a mark on him.

“Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said happily. “Did I miss anything?”