Chapter 812 — The Empty Camp

CHAPTER 812

The Empty Camp

Three grey shapes came out of the fog and didn’t make a sound.

They wore grey sleeves and no banner colours. Two held their auras pressed down hard, but this close Shi Feng could still feel the weight underneath. Early Shattering Void, both of them. The third was lighter and hung back at the edge of the light. Peak Deity Transformation at most.

None of them looked at the woodpile. They looked at the blanket by the fire, and at the boots poking out of it, and at the snoring.

The first man went to the blanket in three quick steps and drove his palm down into it. The skin of his palm had gone the colour of old ash. It was the Ash-Bone Palm, and it sank into the blanket up to the wrist.

It sank into cold python.

“It’s a sn—” the grey-sleeved man cried, wrenching his hand back.

Shi Feng was already off the ground.

He crossed the twelve paces from the woodpile on the marsh water itself, and the water didn’t even ripple under him. Riverless Step at Perfection didn’t need the fog’s help or anyone’s. The first man ripped his hand out of the python and swung round, and the ash palm came straight at Shi Feng’s face.

The grey Sword met it flat.

Iron River Sword Art at Perfection didn’t block force. It moved it somewhere else. The palm’s whole strength slid off the flat of the blade and went down into the campfire, and the fire burst apart in a fountain of sparks. The edge came back up along the man’s arm without stopping, and opened his throat.

He went down across the python.

The second man didn’t waste a breath on his partner. He stepped back, and the air in front of him folded. A rift opened, black at the centre, wide enough for a man to step through and come out behind Shi Feng’s back.

Shi Feng didn’t try to beat the rift. He took the Slag Weight out of his ring.

It was an ugly lump of black iron as big as a man’s head, and it didn’t answer to qi at all. Rifts were made of qi. So was protective qi. The Slag Weight went through the edge of the fold as if it weren’t there, and hit the second man in the ribs.

Crack.

The man flew sideways out of his own rift and landed on his back in the shallows. The rift snapped shut behind him. He coughed red, and his jaw clenched. Shi Feng had seen men bite down like that before, on the Terrace lane.

By the time he reached him, the man was dead.

The third one ran.

He was already at the edge of the light, already turning into the fog. An arrow came out of the dark downwind, white and singing. Frost Feather Arrow. It took him high in the shoulder, and frost spread across his grey sleeve in a ring. He staggered, but he kept his feet.

At the very edge of the fog, he stopped and looked back.

“The Deacon sends his regards to Alchemist Shi,” the grey man said.

Then the fog took him.

Shi Feng stood by the scattered fire with blood on his sword, and his face went flat. There was no amusement left in it at all.

Alchemist Shi. Not the princess’s hunter. Not the banner’s cook.

They knew exactly what he was. Someone called the Deacon had sent three men into an Imperial preserve to fetch an alchemist, like servants sent to fetch a cart already paid for. And the one other man they wanted was behind the princess’s walls in Tianjing, counting.

Splashing came from downwind. Hou Tieshou charged out of the reeds with both fists up, and Yue Shaoan stumbled behind him with his hands over his nose.

“Two?” Hou Tieshou shouted. “Two already? I didn’t even get here!”

“Those were Shattering Void,” Yue Shaoan said faintly, looking at the man in the shallows. “I could smell it on them. Brother Shi’s only late Deity Transformation. That’s a whole realm.”

“In one breath each!” Hou Tieshou said.

“…” Yue Shaoan said.

Jiao Lanyin came last, walking, with a new arrow already on the string. She looked at the two bodies, then at the fog where the third had gone.

“I hit him,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“You did,” Shi Feng said. “He was already at the edge of the fog. You slowed him, but not enough for me to reach him before he vanished.”

“An empty city plan!” Hou Tieshou declared, and slapped his own chest. “Ha! Those fools came for a snake!”

Nobody answered. Shi Feng was kneeling by the first body, looking at the grey sleeve.

From the ashes, the Whisper Conch began to snore again.

“Turn me off!” Hou Tieshou said, red to the ears. “Somebody turn me off!”

Shi Feng picked the hot conch out of the ashes and closed his fist around it until it was cool and quiet. Then he stood up.

“Listen,” Shi Feng said. “Those men didn’t come for cores. They came for me. The one who got away will tell his master that the camp was a trick. Next time they won’t come to the fire.”

“Then where will they come?” Yue Shaoan asked.

“Wherever we are,” Shi Feng said. “So we stop being where they expect. No more camps on dry ground. No more watches at the same hours.”

“And these two?” Jiao Lanyin asked, lowering her bow toward the bodies.

“Bandits,” Shi Feng said.

He laid his palm on the bodies one after the other. The Thousand Forge Flame ran out of his hand, and inside it the Second Anvil Fire beat once, twice, three times, the way a smith’s hammer beats. The grey sleeves went up white. In a few breaths there was nothing on the hummock but a smell of burnt cloth and two patches of black ash.

Out in the black water beyond the hummock, something very large breathed out.

The sound was far too long and deep for a man, and the water around the hummock rose an inch and slapped against the reeds.

Yue Shaoan’s nose twitched. Then his whole face went white.

“Brother Shi,” Yue Shaoan whispered. “That smells like our python. Only much, much bigger.”

Hou Tieshou looked down at the dead python under his blanket.

“…Did it have a wife?” Hou Tieshou asked.