Chapter 523 — This One Counts

CHAPTER 523

This One Counts

The wooden man was no taller than a forearm. It stood on Gongsun Ce's palm with its patched shoulder and its mismatched joints, and the crowd, which had been shouting for ten minutes, went quiet again.

“Is that it?”

“That's the last one?”

“It's a toy.”

“He's out of puppets. Why doesn't he stop?”

“He's a prince. Princes don't stop. A trapped beast still fights.”

Gongsun Ce set the wooden man on the flagstones. He had cut away all ten wires, and now he drew one more from the hem of his sleeve. It was a single silver thread, finer than hair. He looped it once around his right forefinger and let go of everything else.

“Candidate,” Gongsun Ce said. “This is not my best puppet. It is my oldest. It has been with me since I was eight.”

“I know it,” Shi Feng said. “I held its shoulder cover once.”

“Then you know it deserves to be fought properly,” Gongsun Ce said.

“I intend to,” Shi Feng said.

Gongsun Ce bowed formally before lifting his hand. He suspected he would lose, but he wasn’t offering Shi Feng a toy to humour him. He meant to finish this duel with the puppet that mattered most to him.

The wooden man moved.

It was faster than the sixty had been, and much quieter. It crossed the flagstones in three small steps, and a little blade, no longer than a needle, flashed out of its sleeve. Shi Feng raised the Sword. The needle struck it once, high, and the stroke was a Hanging Rain Sword, clean and tight.

He stared at it.

Hanging Rain. He had used that stroke at the Border Market, with a borrowed iron blade, when he was a Foundation Establishment cultivator with a knife for a weapon. He had not used it in two years.

The wooden man followed it with Iron Gate Thrust, and then Stone Splitting Slash, exactly as he had done them. The same angle. The same hitch on the left foot, which he had never fixed.

“It copies me,” Shi Feng said.

“I have watched you for two and a half years,” Gongsun Ce said. His voice was steady and his face was white. “Every Assessment. Every spar. Every bill. I wished to be the first to understand you, and I was a fool, because it cannot be done. But I understood this much.”

The little blade struck the Sword again and again. Shi Feng recognised Ember Rain, Cinder Tide and Drifting Ash Step, shortened to fit the wooden man’s stride. Each attack was cleaner than his own version at the time. Gongsun Ce had watched closely enough to improve what he remembered.

Four hundred people watched in silence. On the rope, Sima Lan's chalk had stopped moving.

Shi Feng thought, He isn't trying to beat me. He's showing me the whole record of what he saw. Two and a half years, put into one little man.

Shi Feng could have cut the visible silver thread in three breaths. Instead, he waited and answered each familiar stroke with its proper counter. Gongsun Ce was showing him two and a half years of careful study. He wanted to acknowledge that work by fighting it properly, not ending it at once.

Ten exchanges. Twenty. Thirty.

By the fortieth exchange, the spectators understood why Shi Feng was taking his time. Neither man was playing with the other. An outer-court girl wiped her eyes, moved by a contest that had stopped looking like a trial for a title.

On the forty-first, the wooden man tried something new.

It was a stroke Shi Feng had never used in front of Gongsun Ce, not once. A dirty short thrust at the knee, from below, with the elbow tucked in.

Gongsun Ce had never seen it. He had guessed it, from two and a half years of watching.

It came very close.

Shi Feng stepped back half a pace on the Cloud Ladder Step, the Golden Core-grade art he'd started at the Assembly, the third stair holding him for one clear breath, and the needle blade whispered past his kneecap. At the same moment, he turned the Sword flat and cut downward, at nothing, the way Severing River cut what had no edge.

The silver thread parted.

The wooden man stopped in mid-stroke, one arm raised, and slowly tipped over onto its back.

Silence.

Then Gongsun Ce's hand dropped to his side, and the last wire floated down onto the flagstones like a hair.

“Winner,” He Zhen said, rather hoarsely, “Shi Feng.”

The crowd came apart in a long roar. Shi Feng didn't hear it. He walked to the little wooden figure and picked it up. Its shoulder cover had come off in the last exchange, and lay in the dust. He picked that up too.

Gongsun Ce waited in front of him, collar soaked with sweat and eyes red. He kept his chin high and held out both hands for the wooden man. Shi Feng understood his distress. Losing the duel mattered less to him than seeing his oldest puppet lying broken.

Shi Feng gave him the wooden man, then the cover.

“No invoice,” Shi Feng said.

“What?” Sima Lan said from the rope. She had stepped forward, ledger open, chalk ready. “Sixty puppets. Rental at three stones a night. Damage, wax, wires—”

“No invoice,” Shi Feng said.

Sima Lan looked at him. Then she looked at Gongsun Ce, and at the wooden man in his hands. She closed the ledger very slowly.

“Noted,” Sima Lan said. It was very nearly a smile.

Gongsun Ce turned the wooden man over, found the loose pin by touch and clicked its shoulder cover back into place. He checked the repair before returning it to his sleeve. He handled it gently, with the care of someone who’d made the same repair for years.

“Before,” Gongsun Ce said, “I would have said that this does not count.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said.

“It has become a habit,” Gongsun Ce said. The prince looked up, and for the first time, in all the time Shi Feng had known him, he didn't look away first. “This one counts.”

He bowed, deeply, and walked out of the square with his back straight.

On the roof of the Register Hall, a voice that had been unusually quiet for the whole duel said, “Junior Brother. Noon tomorrow,” Lin Langtian said.

Shi Feng looked up. Lin Langtian sat at the edge of the tiles with a potato in his hand, not eating it.

“I'll be gentle,” Lin Langtian said.

“Don't be,” Shi Feng said.

For half a breath, the cheerful face above him didn't smile at all.

“Good,” Lin Langtian said softly, and then the grin came back. “Eat something first!”