Chapter 823 — Ledger-Thread

CHAPTER 823

Ledger-Thread

The threads came across the causeway in columns.

There were nine of them, then nine more behind those, each column ruled straight as if someone had drawn it with a brush and a straight edge. They didn’t fly fast. They didn’t need to. On a causeway four paces wide, there was nowhere for anyone to go.

“Ledger-Thread Binding,” Ning Zhe said from his chair, as if he were introducing a colleague. “Heaven’s net is wide and loose, Alchemist Shi, but nothing slips through it.”

The first column reached Shi Feng’s left wrist and closed.

It closed cold and tight. The thread didn’t cut. It counted. He felt it settle on the qi in his arm and write a line there, and that much qi simply stopped answering him. Then the second thread closed on his elbow, and another line was written.

So that’s how he held Master Ji to the furnace, Shi Feng thought. One line at a time, until there’s nothing left in the man that answers him.

He lit his left palm.

The Thousand Forge Flame ran up his arm under the threads, and inside it he struck the Second Anvil Fire. At Major Success the hammer count no longer stuttered. Every beat landed clean, one, two, three, and every beat fell on a thread the moment it closed. The first thread turned red and then white, and broke into ash. The second followed it.

Ning Zhe raised his eyebrows a little and turned a page.

Behind him, the reeds parted.

Two men stepped out onto the causeway in grey sleeves. Neither was young. One had a broad, heavy face and ash-coloured palms. The other carried nothing at all, and the air around his hands rippled faintly as if from heat. The pressure of Shattering Void came off both of them and pressed down on the stones.

“Shattering Void!” Yue Shaoan cried. “Two of them, Brother Shi! Two!”

“I can count,” Shi Feng said. “Keep smelling. Tell me if there’s a third.”

The two takers didn’t come for him. They came round the edges of the causeway for the people behind him.

Hou Tieshou planted himself in the middle of the stones.

“Princess’s banner!” Hou Tieshou roared. “Nobody gets past this old Hou!”

The ash-palmed man went at him. Hou Tieshou met him with the Mountain-Carrying Fist, both arms swelling until his sleeves split, and the blow stopped the taker dead for one breath. It cost him. The man’s grey palm landed on Hou Tieshou’s right shoulder, and the shoulder gave with a dull crack.

Hou Tieshou howled and didn’t fall. He wrapped his good arm around the man’s waist and held on.

The second taker reached for empty air beside Jiao Lanyin, and his hand began to fold into it.

Then it stopped. The fold wouldn’t open. The air by the black pillars stayed flat and hard, held still by the old Long array that kept the Crater gate. So close to the gate, nobody could tear space.

The taker’s face darkened. He came on foot instead.

Jiao Lanyin shot at the water, not at him.

The Frost Feather Arrow went into the marsh at his feet, and white frost burst out over the black water and up his legs to the knee. She shot twice more before he tore free. Each arrow froze him again. The third time, he caught her bow arm as she drew, and twisted. Her face went white, and the bow fell on the stones.

She didn’t make a sound.

“Jiao Lanyin!” Yue Shaoan shouted.

Shi Feng took one step toward her, and a whole column of threads closed on his chest.

Lines tightened across his chest, pressing directly on the bruising around his injured ribs. Then more threads came, at his knees, at his throat, at both ankles. Ning Zhe wasn’t trying to cut him. He was trying to fill him, the way he’d filled a page of his folder.

“The princess’s banner is small, Alchemist Shi,” Ning Zhe said kindly. “Every thread you burn is a breath your friends must buy with their arms.”

He’s right, Shi Feng thought. And he’s counting on me to know it.

So he stopped burning them one by one.

He let the threads close. Ten of them, twenty, thirty, all over his body, cold threads writing their lines. Ning Zhe watched it happen with mild interest. Then, when the last column had settled, Shi Feng struck the Second Anvil Fire all at once, inside his own body, from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.

Boom!

It wasn’t a single beat. It was thirty beats in one, a hammer coming down on every thread at the same moment. The causeway lit up red. Every grey thread on him turned white, and then there was ash drifting down over the stones like snow.

Shi Feng’s robe was smoking. So was his skin, in places.

“Hou Tieshou,” Shi Feng said, without turning around. “Let go of him.”

“Brother Shi, I’ve got him—” Hou Tieshou grunted.

“Let go,” Shi Feng ordered, already moving.

Hou Tieshou let go and threw himself flat. The ash-palmed taker, suddenly free, stumbled one step forward, and Shi Feng’s grey Sword was already passing his ear. The flat of the blade struck him across the temple, and he folded onto the stones.

The second taker let go of Jiao Lanyin and turned.

Shi Feng didn’t turn to meet him. He walked forward along the causeway toward the chair. Jiao Lanyin had picked her bow up with her left hand, and the taker had an arrow-length of white frost growing over his back.

“Don’t worry about him,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly, through her teeth. “Go.”

Shi Feng went.

Ning Zhe hadn’t stood up. He sat with the closed folder on his knee and watched Shi Feng walk out of his own smoke, with ash in his hair and one arm pressed to his side.

“You burned them from the inside,” Ning Zhe said. “Thirty lines at once. That should have cooked you.”

“It burned,” Shi Feng said, keeping the sword between them. “It didn’t hold me. Put the hairpin down.”

He stopped three paces from the chair.

“The hairpin,” Shi Feng said.