Chapter 815 — Peak

CHAPTER 815

Peak

Dawn came grey over the Mist Marsh, and for a few breaths the water around the hummock shone.

It wasn’t the sunrise. The sun was still behind the fog. The shine came up out of the black water itself in a ring ten paces wide around the man sitting at its centre, bright as polished bronze, and then it faded back into ordinary grey.

Shi Feng opened his eyes.

Peak Deity Transformation.

He felt it everywhere at once. His meridians were wider. His qi was heavier and moved faster. The swelling in his left wrist had gone down in the night without his noticing, and the reopened cut along his ribs had closed into a pink line. At the top of the pagoda, nine full layers sat one on another, perfectly still.

He drew a slow breath and pressed his aura down, layer by layer, until anyone who looked at him would feel exactly what they’d felt yesterday. Late Deity Transformation. A little worn out. Nothing worth a second look.

[Devoured: Mist Python King core | Gain: peak Deity Transformation | Note: shown as late. The board lost a fifth. I didn’t.]

“Brother Shi?” Yue Shaoan croaked. His voice had almost gone. “Are you... done?”

“I’m done,” Shi Feng said. “Thank you for counting. You can stop now.”

Yue Shaoan stopped, and immediately looked lost without it.

Hou Tieshou came wading up out of the shallows. He was grey with tiredness, bitten on both legs, and his shoulder bandage was black with dried blood. He bent down and peered into Shi Feng’s face from a hand’s breadth away.

“Well?” Hou Tieshou demanded. “Did it work? Are you stronger? Do you feel like three thousand points?”

“It worked,” Shi Feng said, standing and testing his recovered wrist. “I can carry the cores and fight with them on my back. We won’t have to leave anyone behind.”

“That’s it?” Hou Tieshou said, disappointed. “A whole python king, and you feel like you ate a snake?”

“Strong enough to keep going,” Shi Feng said. “That’s what matters this morning.”

“A man’s heart is never full. The snake tries to swallow the elephant!” Hou Tieshou said, shaking his head in wonder.

Shi Feng took three pills out of his ring and handed them round. A pale green one for Hou Tieshou’s shoulder. A red one for Yue Shaoan’s leg. A small white one for Jiao Lanyin’s bow hand.

Jiao Lanyin looked at the white pill in her palm.

“You had these all night,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“I had them,” Shi Feng said. “I wasn’t in any state to hand them out. Swallow it. You’ll be able to close your hand by noon.”

She swallowed it without another word.

Then she looked at him.

It was a long, cold look, from his face down to his feet and back again. She looked at the water around the hummock where the shine had been, and at the grey crumbs of the King’s core still lying in the mud by his knee. Jiao Lanyin had been the best archer in the contest because she noticed things. She noticed a bowstring stretch a hair before it snapped.

“Your aura’s the same as yesterday,” Jiao Lanyin said at last.

“Good,” Shi Feng said.

She held his eyes for one more breath. Then she turned away and began counting her arrows.

She didn’t ask him anything.

They ate cold rations standing up and divided the cores. There were only the small ones left now, the Mist Python cores and the hounds’ cores from the night. Shi Feng put every one of them in a single pack and slung it on his own back.

“Two ways to the Old Crater,” Yue Shaoan said, drawing in the mud with a reed. His voice was coming back. “East through the deep reeds. That’s two days, and it’s all water and beasts. Or north by the Burnt Pines road. Half a day. Dry ground the whole way.”

“The Burnt Pines,” Hou Tieshou said at once.

“The Burnt Pines is under the sixth Mirror,” Yue Shaoan said nervously. “Every banner knows it. Anyone who wants to rob us will be waiting where the stand can watch them do it.”

“Even better!” Hou Tieshou said. “Let the princess see us! Let the whole city see us!”

“Well?” Jiao Lanyin asked, watching Shi Feng rather than the map.

“The Burnt Pines,” Shi Feng said.

“Brother Shi...” Yue Shaoan began, his face falling as he looked toward the road.

“First, two of us still can’t walk well in water, and the pines are dry,” Shi Feng said. “Second, the grey sleeves don’t like Mirrors. Bandits who get seen on a Mirror have to be explained, and someone in Tianjing would rather not explain them. And third...” He hitched the pack higher on his shoulder. “If somebody is going to rob us anyway, I’d much rather they do it where the whole stand can see exactly who started it.”

Hou Tieshou laughed loudly and slapped his good thigh. “Ha! A cook who thinks like a general!”

“We’ve had enough attacks in fog,” Shi Feng said. “This time the people watching will see who comes for our cores.”

“The hunter becomes the hunted,” Yue Shaoan muttered to the mud.

Nobody answered him. Shi Feng was already walking.

The marsh ended all at once. The water drained away under their feet, the reeds gave out, and the ground turned to grey ash.

The Burnt Pines stood ahead of them for a li in every direction: thousands of dead trunks, black and bare, left from some fire long before any of them were born. A narrow road ran through the middle. Nothing grew between the trunks but dry needles a foot deep.

Halfway along the road, a bronze mirror as tall as a man stood on a stone post, facing them.

The sixth Mirror.

Under it, five figures in red-and-gold robes stood across the road shoulder to shoulder, and the one in the middle was smiling.

“Ah,” Qu Ming said warmly. “The cook. I was starting to think you’d drowned.”