Chapter 688 — Two Lamps

CHAPTER 688

Two Lamps

Shi Feng’s sleeve was already there.

An iron hook the size of a fist hit the cloth and vanished into it, trailing a thin grey chain back into the dark. The Quiet Sleeve Art closed around it. The art hid a man’s qi and intent from other people’s senses, and at Minor Success it hid whatever he held in his sleeve as well.

At the far end of the chain, the hook man felt nothing at all. No weight, no hand, no pull. To his senses the hook had caught air.

Shi Feng pulled.

The hook man came out of the dark at a stumble, both hands still locked on his chain, and ran straight into the light of the gate lamps. Shi Feng’s foot met his chest.

Bang!

The man flew back the way he’d come and rolled across the stones. The chain rattled out of Shi Feng’s sleeve after him.

“One,” Ji Yuanhe said behind him, in a thin, steady voice.

Shi Feng almost smiled. Even now, the old man was counting.

Two of them came next, together, from left and right. The lane was only four paces wide, and they used every inch of it. The man on the left held two short knives reversed along his forearms. The man on the right came with open palms, and the skin of his palms had gone the colour of old ash.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword from his ring.

The knives came first, fast and low, pecking at his wrists and knees, a dozen strokes in two breaths. Crow Pecks Snow, a Soul Formation-grade knife art, built to bleed a man before he could block. The grey Sword didn’t try to meet the knives. It flowed between them, and the flat touched each blade and turned it aside. Clink, clink, clink. Iron River Sword Art at Perfection didn’t stop force. It moved it somewhere else. Every stroke went into the Terrace wall and left a white scar on the stone.

The palm man reached past his partner and caught Shi Feng’s sword wrist.

Cold bit into the bone at once. It was an Ash-Bone Palm, an art that rotted bones from the inside, and the man was smiling because nobody had ever pulled free of it.

The cold reached Shi Feng’s golden bones and stopped. It couldn’t find anything to rot.

Then the All-Devouring Physique opened under the man’s fingers and drank. It took only a palm’s worth of qi, as much as it could swallow in one mouthful. That was enough. The ash colour drained out of the man’s palm, and his arm went slack to the elbow.

His smile disappeared.

“What are you?” the palm man gasped.

“Busy,” Shi Feng said, and threw him into the knife man.

They went down together in a heap of grey cloth and steel.

“Two,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Three.”

Overhead, the Terrace shutters were banging open one after another. Candidates in sleeping robes leaned out of the windows, lamps in their hands. Across the lane, the noodle seller’s door opened a crack, and a ladle and two eyes appeared in it.

“Bandits! On the Terrace lane!”

“That’s the frontier one! The 3 Mark who signed his name backwards!”

“Four Soul Formation against one man?”

“He showed Deity Transformation in the lobby this morning. I was there!”

“Deity Transformation or not, it’s four against one!”

“…Who’s counting down there?”

The fourth man didn’t bother with Shi Feng at all.

He was the biggest of them, a head taller than anyone in the lane, and he came straight at the handcart like a charging bull. His shoulders swelled as he ran. Grinding Millstone Body, a body art that made a man as heavy as the stone he was named after. He wanted the cauldron, and the old man holding it.

Shi Feng stepped into his path and lowered his shoulder.

Boom!

The big man’s charge stopped dead. His left shoulder made a wet, popping sound, and he staggered back three steps with his arm hanging wrong. Shi Feng slid half a pace on the frosty stones and didn’t fall. Golden bone against a millstone, and the millstone had cracked.

Behind him, the handcart rocked. Ji Yuanhe threw both arms around the sacking and held the cauldron on.

“Four,” Ji Yuanhe said. His voice shook only a little.

The four grey men backed away to the edge of the light and stood there, breathing hard. The hook man had his chain again. The palm man was trying to make a fist with a hand that wouldn’t close. The big man was setting his own shoulder against the wall of a lodging house, with a grunt.

The one-armed man hadn’t moved at all. He stood just inside the dark, watching, with his single hand folded behind his back.

“A porter who eats grips,” the one-armed man said thoughtfully. “I wondered about that in Wanhe. I wondered again in the Seam.”

“You could have asked,” Shi Feng said.

“I’m asking now,” the one-armed man said.

Shi Feng held the grey Sword low and didn’t take his eyes off him.

“Then here’s my answer,” Shi Feng said calmly. “Your men are hurt. Pick them up and go home, and I’ll forget your face by morning. Stay, and I’ll remember it for a very long time.”

On the walls above, someone gasped. A man with one sword was giving terms to five.

The one-armed man laughed softly. It was the first time Shi Feng had heard him laugh.

“The people who send me,” the one-armed man said, “don’t accept men who come home.”

He bent, picked a pebble off the stones with his one hand and flicked it.

It didn’t fly at Shi Feng. It flew past him, high and to the right.

The lamp on the right side of the gate burst in a shower of paper and oil, and went out.

Half the lane went black. The dark now came to within three paces of the cart.

“One lamp,” Ji Yuanhe whispered.

The one-armed man took his hand from behind his back.

“Now,” the one-armed man said.