Chapter 803 — Three Falls

CHAPTER 803

Three Falls

Shi Feng walked back out onto the pool.

The water was heaving now, as if the whole nest were breathing. Every step he took landed on a slope that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Riverless Step let the current carry him, and Zhuge Wuyan’s sword was making the current.

The second wave came.

It wasn’t a wall this time. The pool simply rose under Shi Feng’s feet and lifted him a man’s height into the air, and the water blades came at him from below and from both sides at once. He turned the ones in front with the grey Sword. He dodged the ones on his left.

Then the wave under him dropped away.

There was no warning. One moment he was standing on the crest, and the next there was nothing under his heel at all. He fell straight down into the pool, up to the waist, and the cold water closed around him.

On the bank, Hou Tieshou took a step forward.

“Don’t,” Shi Feng said, without turning his head. “If you set foot on this pool, it’s a banner fight. Then he has every right to cut you, and he’d be correct to.”

Hou Tieshou froze with one boot in the air.

Zhuge Wuyan waited for Shi Feng to climb back onto the surface. He didn’t press the advantage, and he didn’t smile.

“That was one,” Zhuge Wuyan said.

The third wave curled.

Shi Feng read it this time. He saw the water gather on his right and stepped left before it rose. Riverless Step carried him along the face of the wave, and for five steps he ran along it while water blades hissed past his collar.

On the sixth step, the wave turned.

Zhuge Wuyan twisted his wrist, and the whole wave spun like a millstone. Shi Feng’s feet went one way and his body went the other. He hit the pool flat on his back with a slap that echoed across the marsh, and a dozen water blades came down on the spot where his chest had been.

He rolled. Most of them missed. Two grazed his shoulder, leaving shallow cuts. He had misjudged the wave’s turn again.

“Two,” Zhuge Wuyan said.

Outside the Antler Gate, the crowd in front of the second Mirror had doubled. Word had run down the line of mirrors that the princess’s cook was fighting Zhuge Wuyan for a python nest.

“He’s in the water again!”

“Late Deity Transformation against peak Deity Transformation, against a Tianxing! What did he expect?”

“He keeps getting up, at least.”

“He’ll be lucky to walk out with his boots.”

“Cangming takes it. Anyone want to bet the other way?”

Nobody did.

Shi Feng got up on the heaving surface and wiped water out of his eyes.

His shoulder was bleeding and his robe was soaked through. Zhuge Wuyan stood twenty paces away, dry from his boots to his collar, with his sword held low and level.

“You can yield,” Zhuge Wuyan said. “It’s no shame. You’ve lasted longer than most.”

“I haven’t yielded,” Shi Feng said, steadying his breathing. The changing footing was showing him a flaw in his own movement art. “Go on. I’m still watching your sword.”

Zhuge Wuyan nodded, as if that were the answer he’d expected, and swept his sword in a long circle.

The pool came up all around Shi Feng at once. It wasn’t one wave now. It was a ring of them, rising on every side, and every slope he could stand on was moving. He picked one and jumped.

It held for one step.

Then it tipped, and he slid down the face of it straight into the path of Zhuge Wuyan’s sword. The man himself had come in behind his own water, fast and silent.

Shi Feng twisted. The grey Sword caught the blade and turned most of it.

Not all.

The tip crossed his left ribs, cutting the robe and opening a shallow wound a hand’s width long. It hurt, but neither bone nor organ was damaged. He fell to one knee on the water, and the water held him only because Zhuge Wuyan had let it go flat again.

“Three,” Zhuge Wuyan said quietly.

On the bank, Yue Shaoan had both hands over his mouth. Hou Tieshou was red in the face and breathing like a bellows. Jiao Lanyin stood very still with her bow in her hand. Her knuckles were white on the grip.

“He’s bleeding,” Jiao Lanyin said quietly. She kept her arrow lowered; he had told them not to turn the duel into a banner fight.

The Cangming swordsmen on the far bank were already relaxing. One of them reached for the two cores on the tussock, then remembered himself and pulled his hand back.

Shi Feng stayed on one knee for a moment, with his hand pressed to his side.

Three times he had lost his footing. Shi Feng recalled the moment before each fall. The force under his boots shifted first; only afterward did the visible wave turn. He had been following the water too late. If he could follow the force that lifted it, Zhuge Wuyan’s changes would no longer throw him off.

Behind Zhuge Wuyan, the fourth wave was already rising, taller than the other three. Shi Feng stood up, and for the first time that morning, he didn’t look at the water at all.