Chapter 781 — Fire Against the Azure Sun

CHAPTER 781

Fire Against the Azure Sun

The sun came down on the north-east corner, as big as a house.

Shi Feng didn’t run from it this time. Running had cost him an eyebrow. He raised his right arm instead, and his sleeve opened under the falling fire.

The Quiet Sleeve Art had reached Major Success on the night the three Azure Sun disciples burned Auntie Niu’s buns.

The lower edge of the sun went into the cloth.

A third of the sun disappeared into the cloth. Qu Ming’s palm jerked forward when the resistance suddenly vanished. Shi Feng turned from the waist, swung the sleeve out over the edge of the stage, and let go.

Whoosh!

The fire came out of his sleeve and hit the lake. Thirty paces of water went up as steam at once, with a roar that rattled the gallery railings. The rest of the sun, torn open, missed the corner and splashed across the stone in a sheet of burning light.

Shi Feng stood in the middle of it with his right sleeve smoking.

The gallery went silent for one breath.

“It went into his sleeve!”

“Where did it go? Where did a third of a sun go?”

“Into the lake, you idiot, didn’t you see the steam?”

“He put the Azure Sun’s fire in his sleeve and emptied it like a teapot!”

Qu Ming’s smile was gone. He looked at his own palm, then at Shi Feng’s sleeve, and his eyes went cold.

“A trick,” Qu Ming said. “A cloth trick.”

He didn’t raise the next sun high. He made it small and hard, a disc of gold fire no bigger than a millstone, and he threw it flat across the stage at the height of Shi Feng’s chest. It spun as it came, and the air behind it shimmered.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword from his ring.

He didn’t block. Iron River Sword Art at Perfection never stopped force. It moved it somewhere else. He laid the flat of the blade against the flank of the spinning disc, a hand’s breadth from his own ribs, and leaned.

The disc tilted. It skipped off the stone at an angle and flew over the stage’s edge into the lake behind him. A column of steam stood up taller than the pavilion’s roof.

The grey Sword glowed red from the guard to the middle of the blade. The hilt was so hot that the skin of his right palm hissed against it. He kept his grip.

Two attacks and two burns, Shi Feng thought. Deflecting the fire was keeping him alive, but staying back would give Qu Ming time to keep attacking. He needed to close the distance.

He stepped forward.

The Thousand Forge Flame Art ran out of his palm and along the grey Sword. Inside it he struck the Second Anvil Fire. The art didn’t make fire hotter. It struck it in beats, one after another, like a hammer working iron, and every beat packed the flame tighter than the last.

At Entry, one beat in three had come out wrong. At Minor Success, it was one in five. It was enough.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The sound rang across the lake. His fire wasn’t white or gold. It was the dull orange of a forge, and it came off the grey Sword in a short, flat wall a pace in front of him. Where the Azure Sun’s heat touched it, the beats knocked it apart.

He walked forward behind the wall. Five paces. Then ten.

The gallery came to its feet.

“That’s a flame art!”

“The alchemist’s using fire against the Azure Sun!”

“Against the Azure Sun’s own young lord, in front of Qu Hanshan!”

“It’s furnace fire. He’s an alchemist, of course he has furnace fire.”

“Furnace fire doesn’t ring like that!”

“…”

Shen Yaoqing picked up her cup but did not drink. She was watching the gap between Shi Feng’s flame and Qu Ming’s, tense each time the orange wall shook.

Qu Ming threw a third disc and a fourth. The third hit the anvil wall and broke into sparks. The fourth came wide, around the wall, and Shi Feng dropped his left shoulder and let it pass over him close enough to singe his hair a second time.

They were twelve paces apart now.

“You dare play with fire in front of the Azure Sun?” Qu Ming shouted. His face had gone red from the neck up. “This young lord’s grandfather is sitting right there! Swinging an axe at the master carpenter’s door!”

Shi Feng kept the beats going. Clang. Clang. The orange wall pushed another pace into the gold.

“Your fire’s hotter,” Shi Feng said, keeping his eyes on Qu Ming’s hands. “But it breaks when the force strikes in the right rhythm. I don’t need to make mine hotter to reach you.”

“A furnace,” Qu Ming repeated.

He laughed again, but it was a short, ugly laugh, and on the seconds’ step, Yao Chen’s hand moved closer to the red towel.

“You think this is a furnace? Stamp boy, this young lord has only been warming his hands,” Qu Ming said.

He brought both hands up together, palms to the sky.

The air over the whole Lake Stage turned white. The heat that came down now wasn’t a flare or a disc. It was everywhere at once, from every direction, and the steam around the pillars blew outward in a ring and left the pillars bare.

Up in the gallery, an old man in a red robe sat forward for the first time.

“The full sun,” someone whispered. “He’s calling the full sun…”