Chapter 503 — Residual Essence

CHAPTER 503

Residual Essence

The mist reached his palm before he asked it to.

It came down in a single slow ribbon, gold and weightless, and touched the skin of his hand. For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then it went in.

The Ledger woke.

The Ledger gave no words this time. Shi Feng's physique began drawing the essence from the dais, and the force of that intake made the whole chamber tremble. The gold cloud thinned. Its spiral stretched into a thread, and the thread ran into his hand and up his arm and into his chest, and kept coming.

Hold, he thought. Hold.

The first wave hit his meridians. They were wide, much wider than a Golden Core's, three hundred and sixty-five channels built to carry what no man should carry. Even so, they strained. He felt them fill, one after another, with heat that was not fire and light that was not qi. The essence held no living will. It was power left behind by the dead cultivator, enormous even after all these years. It poured through his meridians toward his core.

[Devouring…]

The Ledger's bracket blurred and doubled. The characters ran together and came apart.

His core was next. He had built it carefully over a year and a half, drop by drop, from beasts and herbs and ginseng and war spoils. It had been eighty-five parts in a hundred. Now the essence reached it, pressed against its walls and began to fill the last of the space.

Ninety. Ninety-five.

Pain spread through his whole body. His bones hummed. His teeth ached in their sockets and his eyes were full of white light, and for a moment he saw his own hand on the black jade as if from a great distance, very small and very still. He saw his shoulders shake.

Don't breathe out, he told himself. Whatever happens, don't breathe out.

If he opened his mouth, the light would come out with the breath. It would show in his throat, and in his eyes, and every cultivator in the chamber would see it. So he clenched his jaw until the muscles shook and let the heat go down and down, into the core.

He didn't know how long it took. A breath. A hundred breaths.

Eleven peak Golden Core juniors had held their treasures out for an hour and moved the mist by a finger's width. As the saying goes, when the snipe and the clam fight, the fisherman profits. He had simply knelt where nobody pulled. That was the whole secret, and it was the kind of secret that would get a man killed if anyone worked it out.

Then the pouring stopped.

The Ledger steadied. The brackets stopped doubling and settled, flat and bare, on the dark behind his eyes.

[Core: near-full. Note: do not open your mouth.]

He did not open his mouth. He was still pretending to be an exhausted frontier disciple. If the light escaped now, that disguise would be useless. Eleven juniors with raised treasures were close enough to strike him.

He felt the new weight of it. The core pressed heavily inside him, filled with blinding power and strained almost to its limit. Another mouthful and it would crack. It had taken everything the legend had left, and it was holding, barely.

And the chamber was dark.

He noticed it only now. The pale gold light was gone. The black jade floor was only black. On the dais the skeleton sat in a plain grey gloom, small and dry, and there was nothing above it. The mist and its slow spiral were gone. The great pressure that followed him from the gate began to fade with them.

A silence fell, very sudden.

“Wait,” Ao Tong said.

His bell sagged in his hand. The violet thread went slack. Across the ring, Qu Ming's gold lantern dipped, then dipped again, and the thread of sunlight running from it simply fell on the floor and went out. One by one, the threads dropped. A mirror clinked against the jade. Someone's wand rolled away.

“What is this?” a junior whispered. “Where did it go?”

“It was here.”

“It was here a moment ago!”

“Qu Ming!” Ji Wen cried. “It's gone!”

“I can see that,” Qu Ming said.

He had not moved. He stood with the lantern hanging in his fingers and his eyes on the empty space above the bones. There was no smile on his face now. He was watching carefully, trying to work out where the essence had gone.

He turned his head, very slowly.

He ignored the dais and the startled juniors, turning toward the wall instead. His gaze stopped on the frontier disciple kneeling near the dais, palm flat on the jade and mouth tightly shut.

Their eyes met.

For the first time, there was nothing in Qu Ming's gaze that resembled amusement.

“You,” Qu Ming said softly.

Shi Feng slowly raised his head.