Chapter 717 — Four to Seven

CHAPTER 717

Four to Seven

The fourth palm didn’t come straight.

Huangfu Lie threw it in a wide sweep, and the thunder came off his hand in a fan of violet threads as long as a spear. It wasn’t aimed at where Shi Feng was. It was aimed at everywhere he could slide.

Shi Feng slid anyway, low and to the right, under the widest part of the fan. The threads passed over his back. One of them caught the hem of his robe, and the cloth burst into blue sparks.

Crack!

The fourth spiral hit the stone behind him and threw up a cloud of black dust.

“Four,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shi Feng slapped out the sparks on his hem and kept moving. The air on the platform had changed. It stank of scorched stone, and every hair on his arms was standing up.

“Four coils! The air’s full of it now!”

“Every step he takes, he’s walking through thunder!”

“He can’t keep sliding forever!”

Huangfu Lie came on at once. The fifth palm started at Shi Feng’s face and dropped at the last moment to his stomach. It was a feint inside a strike, and it was fast enough that half the crowd saw only the flash.

Shi Feng saw the drop and twisted. The palm skimmed his ribs, right over the cut the canal had left there, and the old wound tore open under his robe. He felt it go warm and wet.

Crack!

“Five,” Ji Yuanhe said. His voice had gone tight.

Shi Feng landed four paces away and didn’t look at his side. He was looking at Huangfu Lie’s right hand.

Five coils shone inside the palm, hiding their centre. The bell had shown Shi Feng what to seek, not exactly where it formed in a moving hand. Watching from outside wasn’t enough. He decided to take a strike and follow the force through it.

He would have to feel one.

Huangfu Lie read his stillness as fear. He laughed and stepped in with the sixth.

Shi Feng didn’t slide.

He raised his left forearm across his body and took the sixth coil on it.

Boom!

The sleeve burned away to the shoulder in one flash. Thunder went into his forearm and up his arm, and every muscle from his fingers to his neck locked tight. He was thrown back across the platform. His heels scraped two grooves in the stone, and he stopped a single pace from the southern edge, right under the attendants’ rail.

He didn’t kneel. His left arm hung at his side, and smoke was rising off the skin.

The whole yard gasped.

“He took it! He took a sixth coil!”

“His arm’s smoking! Look at it!”

“That’s it. He’s finished.”

“A clay Buddha crossing the river! He can’t even save himself now!”

“Judge, stop the bout!”

“The rule says off the stone or kneeling. He’s still standing…”

Ji Yuanhe was gripping the rail with both hands. The book had fallen at his feet.

“Six,” Ji Yuanhe said. It came out as a whisper.

The thunder hadn’t left Shi Feng’s arm. It was still crawling through the meat of it, looking for somewhere to burst. He let the All-Devouring Physique open under the skin and drink it.

The thunder entered his Physique in sharp, painful threads. Shi Feng clenched his jaw until his teeth ached, forcing himself not to interrupt the absorption. Each thread swallowed was one less burning his arm. He paid attention to the direction as well as the pain.

The force turned around a point behind the palm’s visible middle. Shi Feng traced it back to the heel of Huangfu Lie’s hand, where the wrist moved. That was the centre driving the coils. The bell had pointed him toward it; the sixth strike showed him the exact place.

“He took that on purpose,” Qu Ming said quietly in the gallery.

Yao Chen looked down at him. “Young lord?”

“He didn’t need to take it,” Qu Ming said. “He wanted to know what it felt like.”

Nobody near him heard. Everyone in the gallery was on their feet.

Huangfu Lie was walking across the platform toward the south edge, and he wasn’t hurrying.

“You have an arm left,” Huangfu Lie said. “Step off, and keep it.”

“I can still fight,” Shi Feng said. His voice was rough, and he swallowed before continuing. “I haven’t left the stone.”

Huangfu Lie’s face went cold. He struck with the seventh.

Shi Feng’s back was to the edge. He couldn’t slide back. He slid sideways along the platform’s rim instead, with nothing but air under his left heel, and the seventh palm went past him over the edge of the stone.

It didn’t hit the platform this time. It hit the yard beside it, and the paving stones there jumped in the air.

Boom!

Two household guards had been standing in that spot a breath before. They had dived aside in time, and they lay on the ground covered in grit, staring.

“Seven,” Ji Yuanhe said. He had picked up the book again, and his voice was steady now. “Seven, Master Shi.”

Shi Feng walked back to the centre of the platform. He walked slowly, and his left arm swung at his side, black and red to the elbow. Blood had soaked through his robe under the ribs.

The crowd watched the burned arm and bloodied robe, afraid the next blow would finish him. Shi Feng kept his attention on Huangfu Lie’s wrist. He’d taken the sixth for information, and now he had it.

Huangfu Lie raised both hands. Violet light poured off his shoulders and arms, and the dark stone around his feet started to crack in fine lines.

“You lasted longer than I expected, furnace,” Huangfu Lie said. “I’ll give you that. Now I’ll give you the rest.”

“Eight,” Huangfu Lie said, and the light doubled.