Chapter 497 — Folding Fire

CHAPTER 497

Folding Fire

The circle on the door burned without heat.

Shi Feng stood a pace from it and watched the flame go round. Seven tongues of pale fire chased one another along a ring of black iron, always clockwise, never faster, never slower. Whoever made the seal hadn't bothered hiding how it worked. The maker clearly expected brute force to fail, no matter who used it.

Other people had tried. The stone around the ring was scorched, and a pair of boot soles lay at the foot of the door with the boots still on them. As the saying goes, haste won't let you eat hot tofu.

He took his hand away from the iron. Then he sat down, cross-legged, in front of the door.

Brute force was the wrong tool. The seal fed on whatever struck it, and the Ledger could swallow some of that, but not safely, and not without a noise that would bring the whole sky down on him. The flames followed a fixed pattern. Disrupting that pattern would open the door without breaking it.

He knew only one teacher who had ever taught that. The old alchemist's knowledge had come into him long ago, along with the man himself, and it still spoke in his rude old voice whenever Shi Feng needed it.

One memory held a long rant about a cook who'd ruined a perfectly good kiln. Fire isn't alive, you idiot. It goes where it's told, and it only thinks it's free. Turn it one beat against itself, and left is the beat it never expects. Fold it. Fold it left!

Shi Feng once wrote down those remembered words without fully understanding them. Now, with the Thousand Forge Flame Art at Major Success, he did.

He opened his palm and let a single thread of his own flame rise. It was small, red and ordinary beside the door's cold white. He fed it into the ring from the side, a finger's width behind the nearest tongue.

Clockwise. Clockwise. Hold.

He folded it left.

The thread bent back on itself and turned counter to the circle, and the seal stuttered. The seven white tongues pulled toward his thread. They collided, lost their steady pattern and broke into sparks. Then the circle simply stopped, a ring of iron with nothing in it.

The door swung inward.

Someone hummed calmly behind him.

Shi Feng didn't turn at once. He closed his hand and let the flame go out, and only then glanced over his shoulder.

A tall young man in a violet robe stood at the edge of the hall, with a white lightning fork stitched down the front. He looked about twenty-six. He had a plain face, a plain sword and the unhurried posture of someone who had never needed to hurry. Peak Golden Core, Shi Feng judged. And no gold chain. That was almost worse. He didn't need anything to prove it.

“Thunder Abyss Valley,” Ao Tong said, introducing himself without waiting to be asked. “Ao Tong.”

“Shi Feng,” Shi Feng said. “Artificer Hall.”

Ao Tong didn't look at the name. He looked at the dead seal. His eyes were very still.

“You folded it,” Ao Tong said. “To the left.”

“Yes,” Shi Feng confirmed, closing his palm.

“Who taught you that?” Ao Tong asked, watching him carefully.

“An old book,” Shi Feng said.

Ao Tong said nothing for the space of three breaths. Ao Tong's expression briefly changed, then became calm again.

“The last man who folded fire like that,” Ao Tong said quietly, “was being hunted.”

Shi Feng kept his expression calm, although the warning alarmed him.

“Hunted by whom?” Shi Feng asked.

Ao Tong had already turned. He walked away across the hall without hurry and without another word, and when he passed the broken shelves he stepped over Kuang Hai's outstretched hand without looking down. He went out through the far door. His footsteps were lost in the sound of drifting stone.

Shi Feng sat a moment longer on the floor.

Hunted. The word settled in his mind beside a small grey sigil he had told nobody about, and a margin note in an angry hand. They came at the third kiln. They don't fight. They take.

He rose, dusted his knees and went through the door.

The room beyond was a cold forge, a round stone floor with a dead hearth in its centre and rows of hooks along the wall for hammers that had long since gone. The juniors hadn't wanted it. There was nothing to want. But in the ashes of the hearth lay a heap of dull black stones that glowed faintly orange when he picked one up.

Ember-stone. Enough to feed a refining fire for a month. He took four and left the rest. A cold forge was no use to a man in a hurry.

Then he heard it, from the far end of the room, through the second door. It was a sharp, ringing sound, regular as a smith's hammer. Bronze on steel. And between each stroke, a man's voice said one word.

“Again.”