Chapter 655 — Forty Steps

CHAPTER 655

Forty Steps

The guards had gone back to the Pavilion with the tray and the statements. Shi Feng walked up Tower Street alone, with the ledger in his sleeve and the evening lamps coming on one by one along both sides.

They were tall bronze lamps, one every ten paces, and they ran all the way to the Sky Pavilion’s tower at the top of the street. Wanhe people said the Pavilion paid for them. Nobody knew why a street needed so many.

A man was standing in the middle of the road.

He was ordinary, middle-aged, in a plain brown robe. Around his left sleeve he wore a band of grey cloth. Shi Feng’s Spirit Sense brushed him and found nothing to hold.

Beyond Soul Formation, Shi Feng thought, and his back went cold. Far beyond.

He counted the lamps between himself and the tower’s threshold without moving his eyes. Four lamps. Forty steps.

“You’re the nose,” the man said mildly. “The one who tasted my market today and spat it into a tray.”

He doesn’t know who I am, Shi Feng thought. He thinks the Pavilion hired a taster.

“I’m just a shopkeeper, sir,” Shi Feng said politely. “The Pavilion pays me by the stall. If you’d like to complain about the service, the office is right up there.”

“A mouth that can taste forty stalls of my work and spit every one back up,” the man said, “is worth more than the stalls. You’ll come with me. You’ll be fed well.”

“I’d rather keep my shop,” Shi Feng said, still smiling for the man. He checked the distance to the threshold again.

The man moved.

Shi Feng never saw it. There was only a hand closing on his left forearm, and a dry crack. Pain went white up to his shoulder.

The Physique opened under the man’s fingers and ate.

It didn’t take much. That grip held more qi than Shi Feng could swallow in a year, and he only drank one mouthful. But for one blink the fingers loosened, surprised, and Shi Feng twisted his broken arm out of them and ran.

I can’t fight him here, Shi Feng thought. Reach the tower first. Keep moving.

Behind him the air bent. The man was folding space, the way his kind did, to step straight into the gap in front of Shi Feng. Folding space. Shattering Void.

Every lamp on Tower Street flared blue at once.

The fold cracked and fell apart. The man stumbled half a step out of nothing, exactly where he’d started, and for the first time his mild face changed.

So that’s what the lamps are for, Shi Feng thought. The Pavilion doesn’t let anyone fold on its street.

Now the man had to walk. A Shattering Void cultivator walking was still faster than most men could fly.

Shi Feng put his feet down the way he’d learned on the canal, in the dark, after falling in three times. Riverless Step. Never push the ground. Touch it as if it were water and let it carry you. At Entry, he’d needed a river under him to remember how. Tonight there was only stone, and his arm was hanging, and the man’s breath was right behind his collar.

He stopped needing the river.

The stone of Tower Street became water under his feet. Each step touched it once and was gone before it could sink. Ten steps. Twenty. The bronze lamps flashed past, one after another.

Minor Success.

“Stop!” the man snapped, for the first time raising his voice.

Thirty steps. Fingers brushed the back of his robe. Thirty-five. The tower’s threshold was a plain line of white stone in the street, worn smooth by ten thousand customers.

Shi Feng crossed it on the fortieth step and kept going until his shoulder hit the doorframe.

The man stopped dead on the line. His foot was a finger’s width from the white stone, and he didn’t move it.

Shi Feng leaned on the door, panting and holding his arm. The man could have caught him, but he wouldn’t cross the white stone. The Pavilion’s protection reached exactly that far.

The man looked at him for a long moment across the line. His face was mild again. Then he bowed, just an inch, to nobody in particular. He turned and walked back down Tower Street, and the lamps went yellow one by one behind him.

Cen Rong set the arm herself, in the tower’s front hall, with two Pavilion physicians standing by and not allowed to help. She did it in one pull. Shi Feng bit through a strip of leather.

“Clean break. Two bones,” Cen Rong said, angry as she bound the splint tight. “It takes a hundred days to mend sinew and bone. You’ll do it in ten, I expect. Don’t use it for twenty.”

“Branch Master,” Shi Feng said, sweat running down his face, “thank you for stopping him.”

Cen Rong tied the last knot and didn’t look up.

“He was not stopped by me,” Cen Rong said.