Chapter 774 — One Breath

CHAPTER 774

One Breath

Shi Feng had only three open squares left. Before he could shift into another, the seal reached his chest.

The ink spread across his chest and ribs. For a moment he felt nothing. Then it tightened, holding his ribs in place.

He had just breathed in. Now he couldn’t breathe out at all.

His lungs stayed full, and he could no longer send qi from his chest into his limbs. The black character for hold covered his heart. Each time he tried to move, it pressed harder against his ribs.

He tried to break it. He drove his qi up against the seal as hard as he could.

The seal tightened at once. His ribs creaked. The two that Tang Mingyu had cracked hurt first, and the pain went through him so sharply that the stage blurred.

“Struggle, and it holds tighter,” Situ Jinghong said kindly, without hurrying. “Every seal answers force with force, Master Shi. That’s why they’re called seals.”

On the seconds’ step, Ji Yuanhe had stopped counting. His hands were white on the towel, and his lips were moving with no sound. He didn’t throw it.

“He can’t breathe!”

“His face is going purple!”

“Throw the towel, old man! Throw it!”

“…He isn’t throwing it.”

Situ Jinghong walked toward him through the grid of his own seals. Every square he stepped into let him pass, as if it knew its master. He lifted the brush to write again. This one would go on Shi Feng’s brow, and then the bout would be over.

Shi Feng stopped struggling.

He let the seal hold him. He let his arms hang and his ribs stay locked and his breath stay where it was, and the ink stopped tightening. With no force to answer, it simply held, just as Situ Jinghong had said.

Standing still, he could finally look at it properly.

The seal on his chest wasn’t dry. None of them were. Each black character on the stage was still wet, and from each one a thread of ink as fine as a hair ran back through the air to the tip of Situ Jinghong’s brush. Twenty-three threads. The seals didn’t hold by themselves. The brush was holding them, all at once, through the ink.

The brush is feeding every seal at once, Shi Feng thought. Cutting the characters separately would take too long. He needed to break their connection to the brush.

He had one breath in his chest, and he couldn’t let it out. That was enough for one stroke.

The grey Sword came up.

There was no flame in it this time. At Major Success, the Sunset-Splitting Sword had needed fire running down the blade, and it had poured red light across a whole lane like an evening. Now there was only a thin red line along the very edge of the blade, no wider than a thread.

He didn’t aim at Situ Jinghong. He aimed at the brush.

The cut went out along a single line, quietly.

It went through the white jade brush in Situ Jinghong’s hand, just below the tip. It went through the ink hanging from the tip. It went on through the air beyond and split three seals behind the young master, bar, lock and shore, as cleanly as paper. It didn’t stop until it reached the lake, and a line of water jumped up white along the stage edge and fell back.

That was Perfection. The cut didn’t spill over everything any more. It split what it was aimed at and everything that stood on its line, and nothing else.

[Sunset-Splitting Sword: Perfection]

Situ Jinghong looked down at his hand. He was holding half a brush.

The twenty-three threads went slack all at once.

The seal on Shi Feng’s chest loosened. He breathed out, and the breath came out with blood in it. He bent over and coughed hard onto the black stone. His ribs felt as if someone had stood on them, and he didn’t care.

“To catch the bandits, catch their king first!” an old man in a fisherman’s hat shouted from the shore.

Nobody else said anything at all. The whole lake had gone quiet.

Shi Feng straightened up and wiped his mouth with what was left of his sleeve.

Up on the balcony, Long Caili’s brush had stopped above her ledger. Shen Yaoqing was already halfway out of her seat. Behind them, Qu Ming had stopped smiling.

All over the stage, the seals were coming loose from the stone. Cut off from the brush, the wet black characters lifted into the air, wavered, and then began to drift back across the stage.

They were drifting toward the man who had written them.