Chapter 681 — The Gate and Out

CHAPTER 681

The Gate and Out

Four breaths was enough time for Pan Hongzhu to make the hardest decision of his life.

“We’re too heavy!” Pan Hongzhu roared on the last terrace. “Every pack’s over the weight and the door’s closing! Drop the lesser half! Drop it now!”

His company tore their packs open and threw bundles onto the stone. Roots, leaves, seed heads, bark, all of it Shattering Void-grade, all of it left behind with groans of real pain.

Shi Feng bent and started scooping them into his own pack.

“Ah Fu, what are you doing?” Pan Hongzhu shouted.

“The clause, boss,” Shi Feng said humbly. “Whatever the party discards, the porter keeps. You signed it.”

Pan Hongzhu stared at him for half a breath. Then he ripped the last bundle off his own back and threw it on top.

“Take that too, you thieving porter!” Pan Hongzhu bellowed. “That’s for the Third Fold. Now run!”

Shi Feng ran. He made sure to stagger. In fact the pack weighed about the same as a sack of rice.

The last fold’s mouth was a short tunnel of bent air with the white door at the end of it. The company poured through. Shi Feng came last, at the end of Old Zuo’s rope.

A hand came out of nothing and closed on his left arm.

It came from a fold no bigger than a bowl, hanging in the air beside the tunnel. Behind it, Shi Feng could just make out a grey sleeve band.

“Heavy porter,” the grey-band man said from somewhere that wasn’t quite there. “Let’s see what you’re carrying.”

Shi Feng let the arm go loose. He turned it inside the grip, the same small twist that had slipped a grab on a Wanhe street.

The fingers on his arm went stiff.

“That arm trick again,” the grey-band man said slowly. “I’ve seen that once before.”

He knows the trick, Shi Feng thought. He doesn’t know the face, and he certainly doesn’t know the name. Good. Let’s keep it that way.

The pocket squeezed again. The tunnel shrank by a pace. Shi Feng chose that moment to trip over nothing at all.

He fell backward toward the door with a frightened yelp, and the hand on his arm came with him. The arm came out of the fold to the elbow, then to the shoulder, stretched across a gap that was closing from both sides.

Keep hold, then, Shi Feng thought coldly. The man’s arm was caught across his own closing fold. Shi Feng kept falling.

The man’s own fold snapped shut.

The grip on his arm was simply gone. A hand and forearm in a grey-banded sleeve thumped onto the stone of the tunnel, still clenched, and the bent air took it. Somewhere behind the bent air, a man screamed. Then there was a sharp pop, like a bubble bursting, as he tore himself away to somewhere else.

Shi Feng tumbled out through the white door, rolled down a slope of frosty grass, and lay on his back groaning. He used the groan he’d practised for two days, clutching his pack instead of looking back at the fold.

There was no blood on him, and none at the gate.

“Pan’s rope,” Surveyor Ju Dewei called, tapping the ledger with his brush. “Fifteen in.”

He counted the muddy, shaking men in front of him twice.

“Fourteen out,” Ju Dewei said.

“The fifteenth cut my rope,” Pan Hongzhu said heavily. “The Pruners settled it for me.”

Ju Dewei wrote it down without a word.

Behind them the white door shrank to a line, and the line vanished. The black seam in the sky over the dead ring closed. A Pavilion clerk nailed a notice to the nearest white post.

“Hollow Orchard of the Nine Autumns,” the clerk read aloud. “Closed. Next opening in one hundred years.”

All around the rim, people sat in the frost and stared at nothing.

“Cangming lost eleven!”

“Who got the fruit?”

“Nobody. It burst.”

“…All that, for nothing.”

Huo Weiran sat on a rock with his arm in a sling and his face grey. A porter in a straw hat shuffled past him under a huge pack. Huo glanced at the hat, then at the pack, and said nothing at all.

He’ll never know who pulled the Third Fold rope, Shi Feng thought. And he’ll never know which of his juniors kicked a porter in the ribs. That kick, Shi Feng decided generously, was free.

At the rim, Ao Tong sat on his pack and watched the place where the seam had been. When the porter in the straw hat passed, Ao Tong held out one hand, palm up, and didn’t turn his head.

Shi Feng set the waterskin in it. Neither man said anything.

[Money: 8.5M cash | Goods: about 3M, forty kinds of Shattering Void-grade herb | Note: none of it bought.]

Two days later, at dusk, a porter in a straw hat walked into Willow Ford.

Auntie Niu saw him first and dropped a whole tray of buns. Niu Tiezhu ran shrieking into the house. Sergeant Chai, who happened to be at the bun stall, looked at the pack and decided he hadn’t seen it.

Ji Yuanhe was sitting on the doorstep with his hand flat on the stone.

He looked up. He looked at the hat, the ash, the pack and the man under it.

“Four hundred and nineteen,” Ji Yuanhe said. “You’re late.”

“Twelve nights, Master Ji. I came out on the twelfth,” Shi Feng said, grinning. “By my count that’s on time.”

“You’re late,” Ji Yuanhe said firmly.

Shi Feng’s grin softened. Ji Yuanhe had waited here for him, and he wasn’t going to argue about two days on the road.

He reached past Ji for the door latch.

His left hand closed on air, a finger’s width to the left of it.