Chapter 782 — Fire Eats Fire

CHAPTER 782

Fire Eats Fire

The full sun didn’t fall. It closed.

White fire came down from above and in from all four edges of the stage at once, and it met in the middle where Shi Feng stood. The orange anvil wall rang twice and went out. Then there was nothing on the Lake Stage but one great ball of white flame, sitting on the stone, so bright that the gallery had to look away.

Qu Ming stood outside it with his hands raised. The fire did not touch him. He kept his eyes on Shi Feng’s silhouette and the old man’s towel, waiting for one of them to concede.

“It’s over!”

“Nobody walks out of the full sun! Nobody!”

“Lake water’s boiling a hundred paces out…”

“The poor alchemist. He was doing so well.”

“…”

At the shore end of the bridge, Ji Yuanhe was counting out loud.

“Three. Four. Five,” Ji Yuanhe counted, his voice carrying from the shore.

Inspector Nie Liyan of the Imperial Clan Court came down the gallery stairs to the water’s edge in his grey official’s robe. He stopped beside the old man and looked down at the towel in his hands.

“Imperial ring law,” Nie Liyan said smoothly. “A second may end the bout, and the court will accept your towel, registered or not. The candidate will be ash in a few more breaths. Throw it, and the Pavilion can at least bury something. There’s no medicine for regret, old man.”

“Seven,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Eight.”

He held the towel tighter against his chest. He didn’t throw it.

On the balcony, Shen Yaoqing set her cup down on the table. Tea had spilled over the rim onto her fingers. She didn’t seem to notice.

Long Caili didn’t turn her head. Her veil didn’t so much as stir.

“You’ve put your cup down,” Long Caili said.

“It was hot,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly.

“The tea’s been cold for an hour,” Long Caili said. Her eyes stayed on the white fire below.

Shen Yaoqing didn’t answer that. Below them in the gallery, Qu Hanshan sat back in his chair with his hands on his knees again, and the corners of his mouth lifted very slightly.

Inside the sun, there was no sound at all.

Shi Feng stood with both arms crossed over his face. His robe was burning off his shoulders in strips. The heat came through his skin and into his flesh, and stopped at his golden bones, which held. The bones always held. His flesh was still burning, and he had to stop the heat before the wounds went deeper.

Shi Feng gave himself two breaths to study the fire before forcing his way out. His strength remained, but every breath in here burned deeper, and he would not spend a third.

Fire alone couldn’t do this. Ordinary fire spread and thinned, and this one didn’t. At its heart, everywhere he looked, there were grains of red light, tiny and countless, turning in the white flame like dust in a sunbeam. That was what kept it burning so hot.

It was a spirit material. The Azure Sun Sect fed its flame arts on sun cinnabar, ground finer than flour, and this fire was full of it.

The All-Devouring Physique could eat spirit materials as well as qi. But taking this much burning cinnabar at once would leave his stomach aching for a week.

A week of pain, Shi Feng thought. He could endure that. Staying in the fire would leave him far worse injuries.

He lowered his arms, opened his mouth and breathed in.

The devouring opened in his chest. The red grains came to him first, pulled out of the white fire in long streams, and went down his throat. They burned on the way down. They burned worse when they arrived. He kept breathing in anyway, and the streams thickened into a red river pouring into his mouth.

The white fire around him turned yellow.

Then it turned orange. Then it was only red flame, ordinary and thin, and he could see the stage through it.

The gallery saw it at the same moment.

The great ball of white light on the Lake Stage dimmed. It went yellow, then orange, then red, and it shrank. Then it collapsed into a thin ring of flame on the stone, and out of the middle of it walked a man.

He was black with soot from his hair to his boots. His robe hung off him in burnt rags. His left arm was red and blistered to the shoulder, and smoke was coming out of his mouth.

He coughed, bent over, and coughed again. More smoke came out.

“He—he’s walking!”

“He walked out of the full sun!”

“He’s alive! He’s actually alive!”

“What happened to the fire? Where did the fire go?”

“Look at his mouth. Look at the smoke coming out of his mouth!”

“…”

At the shore, Ji Yuanhe stopped counting, and his shoulders came down. Inspector Nie Liyan looked at the stage for a long moment. Then he turned and went back up the stairs without a word.

On the stage, Qu Ming’s hands were still raised. There was nothing left between them to hold up.

“What did you do?” Qu Ming said. His voice cracked in the middle. “What did you do to my fire?”

Shi Feng straightened up and wiped his mouth with the back of a blackened hand.

“Your fire burns on cinnabar,” Shi Feng said, and coughed once more. “I took the cinnabar out. Now it’s only fire.”

His stomach turned over hard, once, and he pressed his free hand flat against it. The week of pain was already arriving early.

Qu Ming stared at him. Then he looked down at his own palms, where the light was flickering, weak and thin.

“Impossible,” Qu Ming whispered. “That’s three years of the sect’s cinnabar…”

“Then your sect should have taught you not to waste it,” Shi Feng said, forcing his voice steady despite the pain in his stomach.

Qu Ming’s head came up. His eyes were red. He bit down hard on his own tongue and spat a mouthful of blood into his right palm.

“Ming’er!” Qu Hanshan’s voice came from the gallery, sharp for the first time. “Enough!”

Qu Ming didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. The blood in his palm caught fire, dark and red, and the heat that came off it was worse than anything before.

“Then this young lord will burn with his own blood!” Qu Ming screamed. “Let’s see if you can still refuse to yield!”