Chapter 801 — Into the Marsh

CHAPTER 801

Into the Marsh

“Python,” Yue Shaoan whispered. “Big. Wet. Close. I think. I’m not sure. Everything in this fog smells wet.”

“Then it’s a wet python,” Hou Tieshou said loudly. “Good! I was getting bored of boars!”

“Lower your voice,” Jiao Lanyin said, without looking at him.

It was the third morning of the Hunt, and the banner had crossed out of the silver pines an hour ago. The Mist Marsh lay in front of them: grey water, reeds taller than a man, and fog so thick that Shi Feng could barely see his own sleeve at arm’s length.

He sent out his Spirit Sense. It reached only a few paces before the fog blocked it. He could make out the nearest reeds, but nothing beyond them.

That was the marsh’s first rule. The fog swallowed Spirit Sense past a few paces, and the water pulled at anyone whose qi was shallow-rooted, until they sank to the waist.

Hou Tieshou had already sunk to the knee. He was a body cultivator, and body cultivators were heavy.

“This mud is grabbing my boots!” Hou Tieshou complained. “Mountain-Carrying Fist, and I’m being beaten by mud!”

Jiao Lanyin went from tussock to tussock with her bow across her back and never once got her feet wet. Shi Feng simply walked on the water. Riverless Step at Major Success only needed a skin of water under his heel, and the marsh was nothing but water.

Yue Shaoan stopped at the edge of a reed bed and sniffed again. His Hundred-Scent Trail could pick one man’s sweat out of a crowded market, but the fog was making him miserable.

“It’s here,” Yue Shaoan said. “No, it’s left. No, it’s—”

The reeds behind him bent all at once.

A grey coil as thick as a water barrel came out of the fog, wrapped Yue Shaoan round the chest and jerked him off his feet. He didn’t even have time to scream. One splash, and he was gone under the water.

“Shaoan!” Hou Tieshou roared, and threw himself forward. The mud took him to the thigh.

Jiao Lanyin had an arrow on the string, but there was nothing to shoot at except fog.

Shi Feng was already running.

He couldn’t see the python and he couldn’t sense it. He could see the water. A long ripple was rolling away through the reeds, and a line of bubbles ran along the top of it. He followed the bubbles, three steps, five steps, and on the sixth he dropped to one knee on the surface and plunged his arm into the marsh up to the shoulder.

His fingers closed on a collar.

He stood up and pulled.

Shi Feng hauled Yue Shaoan out by his collar. The tracker coughed up muddy water, unable to pull the coil off his chest. The coil came out with him. Behind it, a flat grey head the size of a cart wheel rose out of the fog with its jaw wide open.

A Mist Python. Deity Transformation-grade, and nearly full grown.

“Hit the snake at seven inches!” Hou Tieshou bellowed from the mud.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword with his free hand.

The jaw came down. He didn’t meet it. He turned the blade flat and laid it along the python’s neck, just below the head, and let the Iron River Sword Art do what it did at Perfection. The python’s own strike ran along the steel and into the spot where its spine joined its skull. All its force went there at once.

Crack!

The coil around Yue Shaoan went slack. The great head fell into the water beside them and lay still, with its jaw hanging open.

Shi Feng threw Yue Shaoan onto the nearest tussock. Then he reached into the python’s mouth, past the teeth, and found the hard lump lodged behind the jaw. He twisted once and pulled it out.

It was a beast core the size of a melon, pale grey and cloudy, and it was still warm.

Yue Shaoan lay on the tussock, coughing and shaking.

“Bitten by a snake once, you’re afraid of well ropes for ten years,” Yue Shaoan said weakly, staring at the reeds. “I’m not walking at the front again. I’m not.”

“You won’t. Move behind Hou Tieshou,” Shi Feng said, checking Yue Shaoan’s breathing before wiping his blade. “I’ll stay close enough to reach you. Can you stand?”

“Hey!” Hou Tieshou shouted.

Jiao Lanyin lowered her bow. She looked at the python, then at the core, then at Shi Feng’s soaked sleeve.

“It came for the weakest one,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly. “Next time, it’ll be one of us.”

“I let the gap get too wide,” Shi Feng said. He looked at the other three. “Yue Shaoan walks in the middle from now on. If the fog gets thicker, stop and call out before you move.”

On the city side of the Antler Gate, nine great bronze mirrors stood in a row on frames, showing the same nine places as the mirrors on the Tally Pavilion’s wall. A crowd stood in front of each one.

The first Mirror showed the edge of the Mist Marsh. For most of the morning it had shown nothing but fog. Then a young man walked out of the fog onto a tussock, with a dripping tracker under one arm and a grey core as big as a melon under the other.

“Isn’t that the princess’s cook?”

“That’s a Mist Python core! Deity Transformation-grade!”

“He’s carrying it like he just bought it at the market!”

“Didn’t the odds-sellers have that banner ninth?”

“…”

Under the gate wall, an odds-seller quietly wiped the nine off his board and wrote a seven.

Yue Shaoan had stopped shaking by the time they’d wrung out his robe. He held the core up to his nose and sniffed it, carefully.

“It came from the east,” Yue Shaoan said. “There’s a nest there. Three more of them, maybe four. The smell’s thick.”

“Four cores like that,” Hou Tieshou said, his eyes shining. “That’s a whole day’s tally!”

Then Yue Shaoan’s face changed. He sniffed the air again, to the east, and went pale.

“Pine resin,” Yue Shaoan said. “And sword oil. Five men. They’re going the same way.”

Jiao Lanyin’s hand went to her bow.

“Cangming,” Jiao Lanyin said. “They oil their blades with resin.”

Shi Feng tucked the core into his ring and looked east, into the fog.

“Then let’s walk faster,” Shi Feng said. “If two banners get there at once, somebody has to talk, and I’d like to be standing on the dry side when they do.”