Chapter 60 — The Ring in the Empty Room

CHAPTER 60

The Ring in the Empty Room

The doors were neither locked nor sealed.

One had settled deep into its lower groove. Shi Feng folded a strip of cloth between his palm and the edge, lifted, and pushed. Stone grated over stone, and dry air breathed across his face.

His lamp showed a low shelf. On it lay a black ring.

The chamber held a cracked vessel, a lot of dust, and that single small object.

Shi Feng stepped up to the shelf. Old scratches marked where a stand once rested, and whatever had brought the ring here was long gone. The ring itself showed no rust. When he moved the lamp, a faint line under the black surface caught the light and ran inward, deeper than the metal was thick.

A spatial ring, Shi Feng thought, and his eyes sharpened.

The plain storage bag Ling Qingzhu had given him was valuable for what it should have held. This was valuable even empty. A true spatial ring could carry a fortune without making a man hire three porters and invite a robbery.

He wrapped it in clean cloth and lifted it from the shelf.

“Cripple! Leave it!” Duan Kang said behind him.

Shi Feng turned.

Duan Kang stood in the doorway opposite, his flying blade hovering at his shoulder. Ma Zheng held a lamp behind him with a shaking hand, and Pang Xun’s saber was already out. They’d found another passage after all.

“Leader Duan,” Shi Feng said calmly. “You’re alive. I’m glad.”

“C-cripple?” Ma Zheng gasped, stunned, and his face turned pale. “You survived the beast?”

“That’s impossible!” Pang Xun shouted. “I saw the centipede go down that passage! It should have eaten him!”

“It tried,” Shi Feng said. He slid the ring inside his robe. “I found this outside the marked entry chamber, personally. You signed the terms.”

Duan Kang stepped into the room. His flying blade moved with him, its point turning toward Shi Feng’s throat.

“Dangerous objects belong in this leader’s keeping,” Duan Kang said.

“Then start with your mouth,” Shi Feng said.

Ma Zheng’s lamp trembled and his expression twisted with fear. “You’re courting death!” Duan Kang roared, and attacked.

The flying blade crossed the chamber in a streak of winter light. Shi Feng knocked its flat aside with his sword and strode forward. The impact drove the weapon into the wall.

“Come back!” Duan Kang roared, and sent his qi after it. Too late. Shi Feng was already in front of him.

A Foundation Establishment cultivator could scare the porters outside, Shi Feng thought. He doesn’t scare me.

Duan Kang’s protective qi flared. Shi Feng struck the center of it with his fist.

Crack.

The shield shattered. Duan Kang flew backward into the doorframe, and his iron thumb ring hit the stone and flattened. The breath he tried to take came out red.

“Impossible! He’s a cripple! How did a cripple break a Foundation Establishment cultivator’s qi shield with his fist?!” Ma Zheng screamed. “Pang Xun, kill him! Kill him now!”

Ma Zheng himself stabbed at Shi Feng’s back. Shi Feng heard the sole scrape first. After fighting men who sent weapons through the air, he no longer trusted the empty space around anyone’s hands. He turned, caught the broker’s wrist, and pulled him across Pang Xun’s falling saber.

Steel cut deep into Ma Zheng’s shoulder.

The broker shrieked. Shi Feng broke the captured arm, seized the back of his neck, and drove his face against the stone edge. The shriek stopped.

Pang Xun recoiled, his saber stuck for a moment in the falling body. “Ma Zheng!” Pang Xun cried, staring at the dead broker in horror. “You idiot, you jumped right into my blade!”

Shi Feng’s gaze passed over him and returned to Duan Kang. The leader had dragged himself upright. His fingers shook as they formed a command, and behind Shi Feng the flying blade rose from the floor.

Shi Feng crossed the remaining distance in two steps. His heel smashed Duan Kang’s knee sideways, and his hand closed on the man’s throat and drove him against the shelf.

The returning blade slowed.

“Wait, wait,” Duan Kang rasped. “The ring, the ruin, all of it, take it! We can divide—”

“You already chose to divide my neck,” Shi Feng said.

He struck once more, and the blade fell across its master’s boots.

Pang Xun ran.

“Don’t kill me,” Pang Xun begged, scrambling into the narrow passage. “I was only following orders!”

Shi Feng drew his plain sword as he turned. The passage gave the fleeing man no room to swing, but Pang Xun tried anyway, hacking backward over his shoulder in panic.

Shi Feng changed the line of his thrust. The move from Xu Changhe’s notes carried forward without its empty shape. His point slid under the saber, entered Pang Xun’s back, and came out below the ribs.

Piercing Current, Shi Feng thought. It works.

Pang Xun struck the wall with both palms, and his knees folded.

“I can tell you where the other—” Pang Xun choked.

Shi Feng pulled out the blade and finished him. I don’t take directions from men who tried to kill me, he thought coldly. They all knew what steel at a throat meant when they started.

The silence afterward was complete.

Three men had sworn at the shrine that no blade would go below. Ma Zheng had set the oath, Pang Xun had sworn loudest, and Duan Kang had given his word in four words. All three had drawn steel in the dark, so the god’s share was three, and the porters who had heard the oath at the shrine would remember the count when the bodies were found.

Shi Feng stood still long enough to listen beyond the chamber. No porters coming. Duan Kang had apparently decided a treasure room was too good to share with men hired to carry rope.

His greed did us one favour, Shi Feng thought, and wiped his blade.

He searched the bodies. Ordinary spirit stones went into his bag, and good medicine packets into a separate wrapping. Marked tokens, private letters and anything with the leader’s seals stayed behind.

He didn’t touch the corpses with any thought of devouring them. Killing an enemy was not the same as harvesting a beast.

Duan Kang’s flying blade was undamaged. Shi Feng wrapped it instead of trying to wield it. He had the strength to break the owner, but he didn’t have the realm to command the owner’s artifact.

Only then did he look at the ring again.

A careful thread of qi met a smooth wall under the surface. There was no opening to the storage inside. When he pushed harder, only the pressure came back against his fingertips.

Shi Feng stopped.

Xu Changhe’s notes explained the difference between a simple storage bag and a sealed spatial ring. The inner seal of the latter needed Foundation Establishment qi to open. Smashing the metal would give him nothing but a broken ring.

“Storage can wait,” Shi Feng said to himself, and tucked it under his robe.

He went back through the lower passage. At the centipede’s carcass, he drew the last of its vitality until the armored shell lay slack on the floor, then let the heat settle before he moved on. The cooler air led through a crack above a dry drainage channel.

By dusk, Shi Feng climbed out onto the far side of the gorge.

Behind him, Chiyun Ruins kept three men who had divided the treasure before deciding whether its owner should live.

On the road ahead, one question remained. The ring was sealed, and only his own qi could open it, once he reached Foundation Establishment. The tournament notice would say the same thing, loudly, within seven days.