Chapter 663 — The First Bolts

CHAPTER 663

The First Bolts

By dawn, the white posts were up.

They ran around the rim of the dead ring, each carved with the Ninefold Tower. A Pavilion official in white walked from tent to tent, bowing to every sect.

“Honoured guests, the Pavilion has taken this site,” the official said. “We beg your pardon for the trouble. Kindly withdraw beyond the five-li post by dusk.”

“We were here first!” a Cangming junior shouted. “Our senior bled for that ring!”

“The Pavilion is grateful for his sacrifice,” the official said, and bowed again. “Beyond the five-li post, if you please.”

The Cangming junior put his hand on his sword. Then he looked at the white posts and took it off again.

By noon, the sects were packing. Thunder Abyss went first, then the rest, banners down. None of them took the men from the small parties who’d crawled out of the basin in the night with burnt legs and frozen feet.

Those men lay along the rim in a row and begged.

“Brother, water, please…”

“My elder left me. My elder left me…”

Shi Feng walked down the row with his noodle pot and a ladle. His face was raw and his three black fingers were wrapped in a rag, but he was walking.

He gave every man a bowl of broth.

“You came out,” Old Zuo said behind him. “On your own feet. With a gourd.”

The skinny old man carried grey rope in coils over both shoulders. He crouched by the pot to sniff.

“Old Zuo,” the old man said. “I sell rope. Forty years at this rim. I’ve never seen a man walk out of that ring with a gourd. This old man wants to know what’s in it.”

“Broth,” Shi Feng said. “My landlady’s.”

“Sell me the recipe,” Old Zuo said at once.

“What have you got?” Shi Feng asked.

Old Zuo checked that nobody was listening before pulling a greasy paper from his collar. “Every grey-market seller of Deity Transformation-grade herbs between here and the capital,” Old Zuo said. “Names, streets, which ones cheat. Forty years of it.”

Shi Feng took it, read it, and smiled.

“The recipe,” Shi Feng said. “And one more thing.” He opened his coat a finger’s width and let the old man see a single red-and-blue bud in his palm. “This, for you. And in return, you forget where you saw it.”

Old Zuo’s hands shook. He knew exactly what a Frost-Flame bud was worth.

“When the snipe and the clam fight, the fisherman takes them both,” Old Zuo whispered, glancing at the white posts. “And this old man is just a little fish. I didn’t see anything.”

They shook on it.

In the afternoon, the sky above the dead ring began to bruise.

A dark smudge thickened into a purple knot. It hung low over the basin without spreading.

The wounded men stopped begging and stared.

“What is that?”

“That’s a tribulation cloud!”

“For who? Everyone’s gone!”

Shi Feng knew exactly who it was for. Peak Soul Formation, an ocean of a soul, and he’d just eaten the stone that held the ring together. Heaven had found him in the one place he’d stopped hiding.

He turned to the wounded men and beamed.

“Brothers, I should warn you,” Shi Feng said cheerfully. “In a little while there’ll be something worth seeing down there. Viewing is a fee.”

A man with frozen feet weakly protested that he had nothing to pay. He tried to lift himself from the ground and failed.

“Then you can’t afford it,” Shi Feng said. “Please leave. Viewing is a fee.”

He loaded the worst three onto Old Zuo’s mule cart himself and slapped the mule toward the five-li post. The others hobbled after it.

Old Zuo didn’t go with them. He climbed into a drainage ditch with his ropes and lay flat, and Shi Feng pretended not to see that either.

Then Shi Feng walked back down into the basin, to the dead centre, where the root had grown. It was the stillest ground for a hundred li. No sect, no witness, and no one to pay. Shi Feng checked the empty ground around him. Here he could face the tribulation without bringing its bolts down on anyone else.

He unsealed his qi and sat.

The knot answered at once. It dropped lower, and Shi Feng felt something reach inside him and take hold of his soul. The spiritual infant he’d carried since Nascent Soul was dragged up out of the ocean of his soul, toward the sky, to be broken and made again as a deity.

The first bolts fell one after another.

Boom!

The first hit him square. His robe burned away to the waist.

Boom!

The second took him through the shoulder, and the infant inside screamed.

The third was already falling. Shi Feng tore the stopper out of the broth gourd with his teeth and put his fire into it. The broth boiled in a breath, and a sheet of steam rolled out and hung shimmering in the still air.

It was Mo Tianheng’s old furnace trick, from the old ghost’s memories, made to send thieves grabbing at the wrong pot. Hot steam bent the air, and the air lied about where a man was.

The third bolt hit the shimmer and came down one hand’s breadth to his left.

It scorched the ground. It didn’t touch him.

Shi Feng laughed out loud. Ten paces, no more, he thought. Past ten paces the steam thinned and stopped lying. But ten paces was enough. Mo’s Left Fold had reached Entry.

He started counting. Ji Yuanhe’s four beats, the lid rhythm from the Pill Pit, one, two, three, four. Each bolt fell on the four. Each time he leaned into the steam on the three.

The first wave ended. The knot overhead rolled and darkened. Then it began to sink again, slower this time, and twice as thick.

The second wave was heavier than the first.