Chapter 814 — Counting in the Fog

CHAPTER 814

Counting in the Fog

“One,” Yue Shaoan said. “Two. Three.”

He sat in the shallows with his bad leg stretched out in front of him and his dagger across his knees, and he counted every breath out loud. He didn’t seem to know he was doing it.

Shi Feng sat cross-legged on the hummock with his palms on his knees. He didn’t open his eyes.

Inside him, the King’s core was still coming down.

It wasn’t qi in the ordinary sense. It was a whole beast’s life, everything the Mist Python King had eaten and grown into over two hundred years, and it poured through his meridians all at once. Every meridian he had was full in the first ten breaths. All three hundred and sixty-five of them. The flood didn’t stop. It went deeper, looking for somewhere to go.

It found the pagoda.

Eight layers of it were already built and filled. The force rolled past them one after another without slowing, and came to the ninth. The top layer. The one no record in the Empire said could exist, because the known limit was seven.

The ninth layer was half empty. The flood poured into it.

Pain went through his skull from temple to temple. Blood ran out of his nose and dripped off his chin onto his robe. He let it.

“Brother Shi’s bleeding,” Yue Shaoan said in a small voice. “Eleven. Twelve. Is that... is that supposed to happen?”

“How should I know?” Hou Tieshou said. He was standing up to his knees in the water at the edge of the hummock with his torn shoulder bound in strips of his own sleeve. “I’ve never seen anyone eat a python king! Keep counting!”

“I am counting!” Yue Shaoan said.

“Count louder!” Hou Tieshou urged, watching Shi Feng’s face.

Jiao Lanyin knelt at the top of the hummock with her back to Shi Feng and an arrow on her string. She hadn’t said a word in an hour.

“Yue Shaoan,” Shi Feng said, without opening his eyes.

“Y-yes? Should I stop? I’ll stop,” Yue Shaoan said, jumping at the sound of his name.

“Don’t stop,” Shi Feng said. “Keep doing it.”

“It helps?” Yue Shaoan asked doubtfully.

“There’s an old man at the princess’s pavilion named Ji Yuanhe,” Shi Feng said. “When things are bad, he counts. It’s how he holds himself together. It works on me too.”

Yue Shaoan looked at him for a moment. Then he swallowed and started again, a little louder.

“Thirty-one. Thirty-two,” Yue Shaoan counted, making himself speak clearly.

The first beasts came in the second watch.

They came for the smell of the King’s blood, which hung thick over the hummock. Reed Hounds, Yue Shaoan called them before they were close enough to see: long grey dogs with webbed feet, Deity Transformation-grade, running in a pack of seven.

“Seven,” Yue Shaoan said, between counts. “From the east. Two hundred. Two hundred and one.”

“I hear them,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“Soldiers come, generals block them. Water comes, earth dams it!” Hou Tieshou said, and cracked his neck.

The first hound came out of the fog at a run, low across the water. Her arrow took it through the open mouth, and frost blew out of the back of its neck. The second leapt over the first one’s body. Her next arrow took it in the chest, and it dropped in the shallows.

The other five came together.

Hou Tieshou waded into them one-armed, roaring. His good fist came down on the third hound’s skull and drove it into the mud. The fourth caught his leg. He picked it up by the scruff with his good hand and threw it into the fifth.

The sixth went round him for the hummock, straight at the still man in the middle.

Jiao Lanyin turned on one knee and shot it at five paces. The arrow went in under its eye. Its body slid the last two paces on the wet ground and stopped against Shi Feng’s knee.

Shi Feng didn’t move.

The seventh hound took one look at the others and ran.

“Two hundred and forty,” Yue Shaoan said. His voice was shaking, but it didn’t stop.

Hou Tieshou came back up the hummock dripping, with bites on his good leg now as well as his shoulder. He looked at the dead hound against Shi Feng’s knee.

“That one nearly got him,” Hou Tieshou said.

“It didn’t,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“You shot it at five paces! With that arm!” Hou Tieshou said.

“It was in the way,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly, and put another arrow on the string.

Hou Tieshou opened his mouth, looked at her face, and closed it again. Even Hou Tieshou knew when to leave a thing alone.

Twice more in the night something came. A swamp leech the size of a boat, which Hou Tieshou punched until it went away. A heron with a man’s height of wingspan, which Jiao Lanyin shot out of the air before it landed. Nothing grey came. Shi Feng had half expected the Deacon’s men to try again while he sat helpless, but the one who’d escaped had a frozen shoulder and a long way to walk.

Shi Feng sat through all of it with the blood drying on his chin.

The ninth layer took far more qi than the others. Each time the pressure seemed ready to settle, more space opened inside it and drew in the core’s strength. Pain crossed his temples again, but he kept the flow steady.

Shi Feng could release some of the qi and ease the pressure. He refused. The ninth layer still had room, and this core could fill it if he endured long enough.

He held on.

“Nine thousand and eighty,” Yue Shaoan said hoarsely. “Nine thousand and eighty-one.”

Toward the end of the night the fog around the hummock began to thin. The black water grew grey. Somewhere a marsh bird called once and stopped.

The last of the flood went into the ninth layer, and it was full.

The pain stopped at once. Shi Feng’s whole body went quiet.

From the very top of the pagoda came a single sound, deep and clear, that nobody else in the marsh could hear.

But on the grey water around the hummock, the light began to change, and Yue Shaoan lost count.