Chapter 802 — The Cangming Tide

CHAPTER 802

The Cangming Tide

The nest was a black pool in the middle of the marsh, as wide as a temple courtyard and ringed with dead reeds and old python skins. Under the surface, four long shapes lay coiled, asleep.

Both banners reached the rim at the same moment, from opposite sides.

Five swordsmen in blue-grey robes stood on the far bank. Their sleeves were tied back and their scabbards were plain. In front of them stood a tall young man with a long, serious face and a sword that had no ornament at all.

“Zhuge Wuyan,” Yue Shaoan whispered, and hid behind Hou Tieshou. “Cangming Sword Palace. Fifty-eighth on the Tianxing. Peak Deity Transformation. Oh, this is bad.”

“Why are you telling me?” Hou Tieshou hissed back. “I can see him!”

Zhuge Wuyan looked across the pool at them. Then he bowed, properly, with both hands.

“We’ve tracked this nest since dawn,” Zhuge Wuyan said. His voice was low and grave, like an old man’s in a young man’s mouth.

“We’ve tracked it since one of them tried to eat our tracker,” Shi Feng said, bowing back. “I’d call that a stronger claim.”

One of the Cangming swordsmen snorted.

“Big talk from a cook,” the Cangming swordsman said. “One mountain can’t hold two tigers. Let’s settle it the usual way.”

“No,” Zhuge Wuyan said.

The swordsman shut his mouth at once.

“If ten of us fight on that bank, someone crushes a token,” Zhuge Wuyan said. “Maybe two. Then neither banner gets the nest, and both lose a hunter on the third day.” He looked straight at Shi Feng. “Captain to captain, then. The loser’s banner walks round the nest and doesn’t follow the winner through the marsh. Both banners keep their tokens.”

The offer was fair. Zhuge Wuyan wanted the nest, but he was not using his extra hunter to force a fight between the banners. Shi Feng respected that. The Cangming Sword Palace’s reputation for honest, stubborn swordsmen seemed deserved.

“Who’s your captain?” Zhuge Wuyan asked.

“He is,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly, before Hou Tieshou could open his mouth. “He speaks for us.”

Hou Tieshou closed his mouth again, looking hurt.

“Accepted,” Shi Feng said. “But name what you lose, Brother Zhuge. Walking the long way round isn’t much of a stake.”

Zhuge Wuyan frowned.

“What do you want?” Zhuge Wuyan asked.

“The core on your belt,” Shi Feng said. “You’ve touched that pouch ten times since you got here. It must be a good one.”

The Cangming swordsmen looked at their captain. Zhuge Wuyan looked down at his own hand, which was resting on the pouch again, and slowly took it away.

“…It is,” Zhuge Wuyan admitted. “A python’s, from this morning. Then you’ll stake yours.”

“Naturally,” Shi Feng said, taking the melon-sized core out of his ring. He set it on a tussock where both banners could watch it. “The two cores, and the right to hunt the nest.”

“An arrow loosed won’t return,” Zhuge Wuyan said, and set his pouch beside it on the bank.

He stepped out onto the black pool.

He didn’t sink. The water under his boots went flat and still, and the four sleeping shapes below didn’t even stir. Shi Feng walked out to meet him on Riverless Step, and the two of them stood twenty paces apart in the middle of the nest.

Zhuge Wuyan drew his sword.

“Cangming Tide Sword,” Zhuge Wuyan said. “Please be careful.”

He swept the blade low across the surface, once.

The pool rose.

A wall of black water lifted in front of him, as tall as a man and twenty paces wide, and it wasn’t just water. Inside it, the water had been shaped into blades, hundreds of them, sliding over and under one another. The whole wall rolled forward at Shi Feng with a sound like a waterfall.

“Th-that’s a Deity Transformation-grade sword art!” Yue Shaoan stammered from the bank.

Shi Feng met the wall with the grey Sword. He wanted to understand how Zhuge Wuyan kept the water beneath his feet under control, so he tested the flow first.

Iron River at Perfection didn’t stop force. It moved it somewhere else, and the first ten water blades slid off his steel and splashed harmlessly to the sides. The next ten did the same.

But water wasn’t steel. Every blade he turned aside fell back into the wall and came at him again from below. Three hundred blades, and they kept coming back.

He gave up a step. Then another.

The wall kept rolling, and the pool under his heels heaved with it. Riverless Step stood on the current, and the current was Zhuge Wuyan’s now. Every push from below came from the other man’s sword.

He was pushed off the pool and onto the mud of the bank.

There the Riverless Step was nearly useless. His boots sank to the ankle, and he gave up five more paces, then ten, turning blades the whole way. A water blade slipped past his guard, opening his sleeve from elbow to wrist and grazing the skin beneath. It stung, but did not reach the muscle. Shi Feng kept his attention on the returning current.

“He’s being driven back!” a Cangming swordsman shouted. “Senior Brother, finish it!”

Zhuge Wuyan didn’t finish it. He stopped in the middle of the pool and let the wall fall back into the water with a long hiss.

“You turn the blades well,” Zhuge Wuyan said gravely. “But you’re fighting the water as if it were a sword. It isn’t.”

“Every blade I turn goes straight back into the wave,” Shi Feng said, shaking mud from his boot. “So the force keeps returning. You’re still controlling all of it.”

Zhuge Wuyan lifted his sword again. Behind him, the whole black pool began to rise, much higher than before.

“The first wave,” Zhuge Wuyan said. “Of nine.”