Chapter 504 — The Sky Comes Down

CHAPTER 504

The Sky Comes Down

Qu Ming's lantern came up, and the chamber floor split in half.

The crack ran from the dais to the wall with a roar like splitting mountain rock. The skeleton on its stone sat a moment longer. Then its head tipped, its shoulders folded and the whole frame collapsed into a small heap of grey dust. A breath of wind took it.

It was not the juniors' doing. The Ruin had felt its master's last breath leave.

“It's falling!” someone screamed.

The ceiling answered. A slab as big as a house tore loose from the dome and drifted, tilting, and then dropped. It struck the far edge of the jade floor and burst. Dust and splinters of black stone swept across the chamber. The light flickered from gold-white to a dull red.

“Seize him!” Qu Ming shouted.

Shi Feng was already running.

The pressure was gone. It no longer pinned his shoulders down, and he could finally stand straight. He used it. He drove off the jade with the Drifting Ash Step, ugly and crooked, and a gold thread stabbed into the floor where his heel had been.

“Ji Wen! Xie Yun!” Qu Ming ordered, pointing at Shi Feng.

“Here!” Ji Wen and Xie Yun shouted together, moving to cut him off.

The chain came first, hissing over his head to loop his throat. He ducked, and it bit the wall. The sun-disc followed it. He caught that one on the flat of the Sword, because there was nowhere to dodge.

Boom!

The grey blade rang, and Shi Feng felt the Ledger reach for the blow. His physique tried to devour the force, as usual. This time, his full core had no space to receive it.

[Core: full to the lip. Cannot devour.]

The force went straight through him instead. It struck his ribs hard enough to crack them. He flew sideways, struck a pillar and slid down it, tasting blood, with his jaw still locked.

Don't open your mouth, he told himself. Don't.

“He's alive!” Xie Yun cried. “He took my disc!”

“That's what he does,” Ji Wen said sharply. “Look at his hands. He devoured it!”

“He did not,” Qu Ming said. He had come up behind them without hurry, the lantern swaying at his side. His eyes were fixed on Shi Feng's chest. “He is full. Look at his breathing. He swallowed the legend and now can't swallow anything else.” He smiled, thinly. “A frontier sect's dog ate from the Empire's table. A toad has tasted swan meat. Kill him, and cut it out of him.”

The floor lurched again.

This time it was not a crack. It was the whole chamber, tilting, and the tilt pulled every cultivator toward the wall. Slabs rained from the dome. Beyond the arch, the stair of floating stones broke apart with a roar, one slab after another falling into the pale sky.

“Young Lord!” a junior shouted. “The exits are opening!”

They were. In the air above the dais, a ring of white light had appeared, wide as a gate. Another bloomed above the north wall. A third formed beside the arch, then a fourth, then a dozen, flashing in and out of being at random heights. Each one dragged the nearest cultivator toward it.

“It's throwing us out!” Ao Tong said. He didn't shout. He stood where he was with his bell hanging from his hand and his eyes on Shi Feng, and he did not move to stop him. “The Ruin is sending us out one by one!”

“Don't let him leave!” Qu Ming said. “Take him now!”

A gold ribbon of light shot across the chamber and wrapped around Shi Feng's wrist. He felt Qu Ming's strength, calm and steady and impossible to break, haul him back across the jade.

He did not break it. He did the one thing it hadn't been built for.

He cut the sleeve.

The Sword came up and sliced through his left sleeve above the wrist. The ribbon snapped taut and tore away with a scrap of fabric in its coils, and Shi Feng pitched forward. He hit the floor on his hands. A rock fell where he'd been standing and he rolled through the splinters.

A white light opened directly in front of him.

“Stop him!” Qu Ming shouted. “A grey robe! Grey sword!”

“Frontier boy!” Ji Wen yelled, spinning as a gate of light caught him by the back of the neck. “Plain face, about twenty! He ate the legend!”

“Grey robe, grey sword!” Xie Yun cried, vanishing sideways. “He ate it! He ate it!”

Another junior tried to shout a final warning to remember Shi Feng's face, but vanished before finishing.

The voices were whisked away, one after another, as the juniors were pulled from the chamber. Qu Ming was the last to go. He stood alone beside the cracked dais, the gold lantern burning in his hand, and he looked at Shi Feng across forty paces of falling stone. He was clearly fixing Shi Feng's face in his memory.

Then the light took him.

Shi Feng did not wait to see what Ao Tong did. He gathered himself, jaw shut, ribs aching, and threw himself into the gate in front of him.

The sky-cave went white.