Chapter 558 — Qingzhu

CHAPTER 558

Qingzhu

Nothing moved.

Shi Feng lay in the dark with the stars above him and counted what he still had. His eyes worked. His ears worked, though there was nothing to hear. His hands were at his sides, and he could feel the cold in his fingers. His body was whole. That was all.

His qi wasn't answering.

He sent a call down into the dantian, and the Nascent Soul sat there, small and bright and still. It wouldn't rise. Its power was still there, but he couldn't draw on it. Something stronger was holding it down before it could reach his meridians.

Then he tried the Spirit Sense again.

He forced it outward and met resistance at once. It spread a hand's width and stopped, pressed flat to him, and no matter how hard he pushed, it would not go farther. He couldn't feel the sky. He couldn't feel the ground, if there was ground. He could only feel the weight, and the weight was everywhere.

It was the same weight he had felt over the lantern street. Up close, he understood he had been wrong about it. It hadn't been a ship. A ship was something you could pass under. This was something that had been watching the city and picked one thing in it.

Slowly, Shi Feng turned his eyes to the side.

He was not in the alley. He wasn't in Luoxia. Space around him had bent inward. The edges of the world folded in toward him, and beyond them he could see faint pieces of what had been there: a slice of a wet wall, a corner of the yard, the red glow of the old man's sugar pole, hanging in the air upside down. Far, far below, small as a handful of embers, he saw Luoxia's lantern streets. They were already tiny.

So they hadn't disappeared. He had.

Shi Feng's heart sank. That meant Ling Qingzhu was still in the yard, with no way to see where he'd gone. In the alley, he had thought everyone else had vanished. They hadn't. The street was where it had always been, with its old man and its sugar and its three red sticks, and a woman with a rabbit lamp who had been laughing at him. He was the one the world had taken out of it.

Above him, something stood in the sky.

It was a shape, no more. A tall figure in a loose robe, hands folded behind its back, standing on nothing. The stars were behind it, and its face was only a darkness the shape of a face. It had been there all along, Shi Feng realised, perfectly calm. It hadn't needed to hide. The folding space had hidden it from everyone except the one it was for.

The figure looked down at him for a long moment. Shi Feng felt it as a weight settling on his ribs.

“Younger than the list says,” the figure said.

The voice was dry, unhurried and mildly bored. It was a man's voice, not old and not young. It did not sound angry. It did not sound pleased. The lack of anger frightened Shi Feng more. The man had taken him without effort and wasn't concerned about what he'd do next.

Shi Feng said nothing. He had nothing to bargain with. His mind went to the storage ring, and his hand did not move.

“Don't,” the figure said. “It'll go faster.”

Something else struck him then, a thought as plain as the weight on his chest, and it wasn't about the figure or the ring.

She was down there.

She was standing in a yard with a rabbit lamp in her hand, and she had been in the middle of a sentence. She had turned to look at the man who was paying, and he was not there. In a breath, or two, or ten, she would understand that. Then she would call his name, the way she called it on the road, with the teasing taken out. She would look at the alley, then the wall, then the sky.

She wouldn't see anything. The fold had taken him clean.

Husband. She had said it all day. He'd answered to it once, and that had been enough to make her laugh in the middle of a street. He had said later. He had said when it counts. It counts now, she had told him, on the bridge, and he had said later still.

His mouth was dry.

Shi Feng turned his head toward the tiny distant glow and the place in it where she had stood. He could not call. She couldn't have heard him if he did. The fold ate every sound, and he had no breath to spare.

He said it anyway.

“Qingzhu,” Shi Feng said.

It came out in a whisper, with no clan and no formality. It was the first time he had ever said it. It went into the dark and was gone.

The figure in the sky tilted its head, as if it had heard something.

“Hm?” the figure said.

A finger lifted. Shi Feng did not see it move. There was only the sensation of a quiet, unhurried hand touching his forehead, without enough force to hurt. Shi Feng couldn't even turn away from that light touch.

The stars went out.