Chapter 502 — The Quiet Chamber

CHAPTER 502

The Quiet Chamber

The pressure grew much stronger beyond the third arch.

Shi Feng stepped through, bent double, struggling to draw a full breath. He felt his ribs creak. The light was pale and gold-white and came from everywhere, and the floor was a single sheet of black jade that went on for a hundred paces. At the far end, on a dais of floating stone, a skeleton sat cross-legged.

It was small. That surprised him. He had pictured something vast, a giant of bone with a crown. This was only a man's frame, wrapped in a rotted robe, with both hands resting on the knees and the skull bowed as if in thought. Above it, in a slow spiral, turned a cloud of pale gold mist.

That was the thing the Empire had come for. It breathed. It brightened and dimmed with a long, patient rhythm, and every time it brightened the whole chamber seemed to take a breath with it.

Residual essence, Shi Feng thought. The last of a legend, still turning over in his sleep.

He didn't look at it for long. He looked at the people.

They stood in a ring round the dais, eleven in all, spaced like the points of a star. No one touched the mist. Each held something out toward it, and each of those things shone.

Qu Ming held a lantern of beaten gold, no bigger than a fist, and a thread of sunlight ran from it to the cloud. Across from him Ao Tong stood with a small black bell, and from the bell a thread of violet lightning ran to the same cloud. Other juniors held a mirror, a comb, a seal, a wand. Every thread tugged at the mist from a different side. The mist swelled toward each in turn and shivered, and none of them could draw it free.

“Your side is leaking,” Qu Ming said pleasantly.

“Your side is shaking,” Ao Tong said.

“If I let go, you'll take it all,” Qu Ming said, holding his lantern steady.

“If I let go,” Ao Tong said, “so will you.”

“We could let go together,” Qu Ming suggested without loosening his grip.

“We could,” Ao Tong agreed, keeping his own treasure raised.

Neither of them did. Their polite exchange hid a dangerous stalemate. Shi Feng understood it at once. If one thread was cut, the others would snap onto the mist, and whoever held the last one would claim the legend's remaining essence. So they stood still, with their treasures shaking, and waited for someone else to be stupid first. As the saying goes, beat the grass and you startle the snake.

Which meant none of them would look at the wall.

He started along it.

It took him a long time. He didn't dare to walk, only to lean and slide, one shoulder against the cool black stone, dragging the Sword's point behind him. Twice his knee gave way, and he let it. He gave a little cough each time, a desperate, real-sounding one. The pressure was crushing his chest, and he didn't have to pretend very much.

Two-thirds of the way round, a bored voice spoke.

“Look,” Ji Wen said. “A local made it in.”

Shi Feng stopped, bowed against the wall like a man at the end of his strength.

“Kill him?” Xie Yun asked, without turning. His narrow face was soaked with sweat, and his sun-disc trembled in his raised hand. He plainly did not want to spare a finger.

“Why?” Qu Ming said. He did not take his eyes from the gold lantern. “He's crawling. He can't breathe within thirty paces of the dais. Let him watch. Let him tell the frontier what the Empire looked like.”

“As you say,” Xie Yun replied, returning his attention to the sun-disc.

“How does it look?” Qu Ming asked, in the tone of a man amusing himself. “Little local. How does the Empire look?”

Shi Feng raised his head by an inch. He met a pair of eyes the colour of dawn, calm and curious and unconcerned by the life of the frontier cultivator struggling beside him.

“Bright,” Shi Feng said hoarsely.

Qu Ming smiled.

“Good boy,” Qu Ming said, and returned to his lantern.

Shi Feng lowered his eyes again, and kept sliding.

Seven paces from the dais, the pressure bit hard. He felt his left knee shake. His vision swam. Then the Ledger spoke in his mind.

[Residual essence: devourable. Note: very much so.]

He did not answer it. He knew what it was. It was the same hunger that had eaten waste pills and spirit iron and the force of a Golden Core's palm. It had never wanted anything so badly. Its hunger grew stronger as he approached the cloud.

Think, he told himself. All those threads. All those hands. Each of them is tied to a treasure, and each treasure is tied to a person. The mist is held on eleven sides by eleven people who dare not move.

And I have no treasure.

Nothing was tied to him. No thread ran from his hand. He was a gap in the ring, the one place where nobody was pulling.

Four paces. Three.

He sank to his knees, apparently exhausted, and set his left palm flat on the black jade within an arm's length of the dais. The gold mist turned lazily above the bones, close enough now to touch his hair. It smelled of rain on hot stone.

Ao Tong's eyes flicked toward him for an instant, and away.

Shi Feng raised his hand.