Chapter 664 — The Nine Floors

CHAPTER 664

The Nine Floors

Old Zuo had sold rope at the Hanyan rim for forty years, and he had never been this frightened.

He lay flat in the drainage ditch with six coils of rope piled on his back and peeked over the edge. Down in the basin, the lightning didn’t flicker and move on the way lightning should. It stood on one spot. Bolt after bolt fell into the same place in the dead centre, as thick as temple pillars, purple and white.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ground shook so hard that his teeth clicked. Pebbles danced in the ditch around his nose.

What was it? A sect elder breaking through? No sect elder would sit in a dead ring with nobody watching his back. A treasure? Treasures didn’t call lightning.

An hour passed, and it was still falling on that one spot.

Old Zuo had seen plenty of tribulations from this ditch. Sect geniuses with ten guards and a ring of arrays, beasts crawling out of the ice to die. None of them had lasted this long. None of them had brought lightning this heavy.

Whatever’s down there, it’s no man, Old Zuo decided. A Deity beast. A Deity Transformation beast, passing its tribulation in the old lake bed. That’s what it is.

And a story like that would sell in every teahouse in Tianjing.

He was still working out his price when the last bolt fell, and the sky went quiet.

In the calm, Shi Feng sat in a ring of black glass and let the deity settle.

It had come back down out of the sky remade. It wasn’t an infant any more. It was a small, still figure of light, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his soul. He was early Deity Transformation.

Now it needed a house.

His spiritual concentration gathered around it, and he began to build. The first floor of the pagoda went down. The second went up on top of it. Every cultivator who came through the tribulation built one of these, and the number of floors was the grade of what he built.

Three. Four. Five.

Each one was harder than the last. He laid them on Ji Yuanhe’s count, one, two, three, four, a floor on every four.

Six.

Seven.

The seventh settled into place, and he felt it. That was the known limit, the legendary one. In the whole Empire, a seven-floor pagoda was a story told about ancients.

Shi Feng sat and looked at it for a long time.

Nobody had graded his foundation or core. His bones were gold to the last one, beyond the ordinary Bone Refinement path. Why should he assume the known pagoda limit was his limit too?

He started the count again.

The eighth floor fought him. It took everything he had, and when it went down his nose was bleeding. The ninth took longer. He counted Ji Yuanhe’s four beats more than a thousand times before it settled and closed, and the pagoda stood complete, nine floors high, with the deity sitting quietly at the top.

The Nine Floors. The Second Extreme, after the gold of his bones.

Nobody would ever know. He drew his aura in, fold by fold, until it felt like an ordinary peak Soul Formation again. He checked the concealment twice, making sure no trace of the new deity escaped.

Then he stood up, and his left knee gave way.

Old Zuo was sitting up in his ditch when a man came limping out of the basin.

The man’s robe was gone to the waist. His face was raw, his hair was singed short, and three fingers of his left hand were black. He was smiling.

“You!” Old Zuo said. “You were down there! What happened to you?”

“I fell,” Shi Feng said.

“You fell?” Old Zuo repeated.

“Hard,” Shi Feng said.

Old Zuo stared at him. Then at the basin. Then back at him. He clearly decided that he’d seen a Deity beast, and that a man who’d survived falling near one was simply lucky.

“A man who lives through a great calamity is bound for good fortune,” Old Zuo said, and pulled off his outer coat. “Here. It’s a loan, not a gift. This old man wants it back.”

“You’ll get it back washed,” Shi Feng promised, and put it on.

At the five-li post, a stretcher lay beside the road with a bandaged young man on it. His juniors had gone for a cart. Huo Weiran had been lying there all afternoon with nothing to do except watch the sky.

Shi Feng stopped beside him in the borrowed coat.

“Senior Huo,” Shi Feng said cheerfully. “You had the best seat on the ridge. How was the view?”

“Bumpkin, you’re courting d—” Huo Weiran snapped, his face reddening.

His hand closed on the hilt of his sword, and the sword didn’t come up.

It wasn’t that his arm was hurt. For one breath, something in his body simply refused. His fingers stayed locked on the hilt, and his arm stayed exactly where it was.

Then the breath passed. Huo Weiran’s hand loosened. He stared at the limping, half-burnt alchemist with real confusion.

“Get lost,” Huo Weiran said hoarsely.

“No charge for the question,” Shi Feng said, and limped on.

That night, by a roadside fire, he opened his notebook and wrote one word.

Nine.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he tore the page out and held it to the flame until it was ash.