Chapter 764 — Around the Line

CHAPTER 764

Around the Line

Gu Yanxing thrust for the third time, and this time he put everything into it.

The tassel under the spear head snapped straight out behind the point. The line came across the stage, and the weight behind it was so heavy that the mist above the water split in two. There was no blocking this one, and Shi Feng didn’t try.

A wave washed up over the lip of the stage under his boots.

Riverless Step didn’t stand on water. It stood on the current. It stepped where the river pushed up and let the push carry it. The wash running sideways along the edge of the stage was only a finger deep, but it was moving, and that was all the art needed.

Shi Feng stepped onto it, and it carried him.

He slid sideways along the stage’s edge, two paces, without lifting his feet. The spear point went through the place where his chest had been, and the whole weight of the line went out over the lake behind him. The water there burst up in a white wall as tall as the stage pillars.

“He’s gone!”

“No! Look! He’s beside it!”

Shi Feng was standing beside the spear’s haft, close enough to touch it.

Gu Yanxing pulled the spear back at once. A soldier’s hands didn’t hesitate. But a spear that goes out a long way has to come back a long way, and Shi Feng could follow the force of its return. He moved with it instead of trying to force the haft aside. Riverless Step took the pull of the withdrawing haft the same way it had taken the wash, and he went in along the iron with it, step for step, as fast as Gu Yanxing could draw it back.

Twelve paces became six, then three.

Gu Yanxing understood. His eyes went hard, and he shortened his grip to thrust again from close in.

It was too close. A spear needs room for its line, and there wasn’t any left. Shi Feng was already inside its reach, where the point couldn’t follow him, and the grey Sword was rising.

Thousand Forge heat ran into the blade, and the grey turned the colour of evening.

The Sunset-Splitting Sword at Major Success was a red light that spread across the whole stage, over the water and both men and the front rows of the galleries. Inside the light there was one thin edge. It cut across the spear just below its head.

It went through the horsehair banner and the black iron haft in one stroke.

Clang!

The spear head hit the stone and rang there. Cut strands of red and black horsehair scattered over it. Gu Yanxing was left holding six feet of headless iron, and the grey Sword had stopped a finger’s width from his collarbone.

For a moment, nobody on the shore made a sound.

Gu Yanxing looked at the cut end of his spear. The iron was smooth and still glowing faintly red. Then he looked at the tassel on the stone.

He could have fought on. Six feet of iron was still a staff, and he was still peak Deity Transformation. Everyone on the shore knew it.

Gu Yanxing let go of the haft. It clanged down beside its head.

“Without the banner, it isn’t the Iron Banner Spear,” Gu Yanxing said. “I yield.”

Then he bowed, a soldier’s bow, with his fist in his palm and his head down, and he held it a long time.

The galleries came apart.

“He yielded! The Gu heir yielded!”

“Late Deity Transformation beat peak! That’s a whole stage!”

“Did you see? He rode the lake! He walked on the waves along the edge!”

“He went in with the spear! He let the spear pull him in!”

“Eighty-sixth! Eighty-sixth on the Tianxing, and he’s an alchemist!”

“Gold buried in sand still shines!”

“…Somebody tell me how much I just lost.”

Up on the top balcony, a white sleeve moved and went still again. Beside it, Princess Long Caili, veiled as always, wrote one line in her ledger.

Shi Feng lowered the grey Sword. Now that the fight was over, his left shoulder was beginning to burn properly, and the blood was running all the way down to his fingers again.

Gu Yanxing straightened from his bow.

“You couldn’t block it,” Gu Yanxing said. It wasn’t a taunt. He sounded like an officer going over a battle afterward.

“No,” Shi Feng agreed. “You kept driving force through the spear. I couldn’t turn it aside. So I moved beside it and came in while you were drawing it back.”

Gu Yanxing thought about that. Then he nodded slowly. He was disappointed in his defeat, but he’d understood exactly where Shi Feng had beaten him.

“Someday,” Gu Yanxing said, “I’d like a rematch. When I’ve learned to bend.”

“Yes,” Shi Feng said, holding his shoulder. “I’d like to see how you change the art.”

For the first time in the whole contest, Gu Yanxing’s mouth twitched at one corner. He picked up the spear head and the cut haft, tucked both under his arm, and walked back across the bridge with his back straight.

On the step, the one-eyed officer had already put his towel away. He watched his young general come past him, and then he turned and looked at Shi Feng with his one eye for a long time. Then he walked off the bridge and along the shore toward the city, fast, the way a man walks when he’s carrying a report.

Shi Feng came back across the bridge to the candidates’ bench. Cheng Mobai threw him a strip of clean cloth without a word, and Shi Feng tied it round his shoulder with one hand and his teeth.

“He nearly put you in the lake three times,” Cheng Mobai said.

“Twice,” Shi Feng said. “The third time I was waiting for the water. I needed it moving under my feet.”

Up on the third tier, Ji Yuanhe had stopped counting. He let out his breath and sat back, and Auntie Niu thumped him on the back so hard he nearly fell off the bench.

By noon, the general’s house would know.