Chapter 825 — The Old Crater

CHAPTER 825

The Old Crater

The banners came out of the dark from every side and ran for the gate.

Shi Feng counted five flags in the torchlight. The Third Prince’s black-and-silver went through first. The Cangming Sword Palace’s blue came next, then two family banners so close together that their bearers kept shoving. The Great Compassion Temple’s plain brown came last and slowest, carrying its own monk on a litter.

“Brother Shi!” Hou Tieshou shouted. He was up with his arm strapped to his chest. “They’re all going in! What are we waiting for?”

“For you to sit down,” Shi Feng said. “You’ve got one shoulder.”

“I’ve got two legs! Riches and honour are sought in danger!” Hou Tieshou said.

Jiao Lanyin looked at Shi Feng over her bound arm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Two of the four were hurt, and the Crater wasn’t the Silver-Pine Ring.

“Here’s how it goes,” Shi Feng said. “Whatever’s in the Crater doesn’t count toward the tally. But anything found inside belongs to the finder. That’s why they’re running. Hou Tieshou and Jiao Lanyin hold the gate and guard our cores. Yue Shaoan comes with me, because I need his nose.”

“Me?” Yue Shaoan squeaked.

“You,” Shi Feng said. “You smelled two Shattering Void takers through a reed bed tonight. I want you to smell a flower.”

Yue Shaoan swallowed and came.

The Old Crater was a bowl of black stone two li across, its walls dropping in rough steps to a lake that gave off a faint silver light. The water didn’t move at all.

The other banners were already halfway down the slope, shouting, racing each other for the shore.

“What’s the hurry?” Yue Shaoan panted. “If nothing in here counts toward the tally—”

“It’s still theirs,” Shi Feng said. “Whatever they carry out, they keep. Half of them came to the Hunt for this night alone.”

They were thirty steps above the shore when the lake rose.

It didn’t splash. A dome of water lifted smoothly out of the middle of the lake and kept lifting, until the water ran off a shell the size of a courtyard. The shell was grey-green and old, cut into great plates, and down the middle of its back ran a line of high ridges.

“Rift-Back Tortoise!” a hunter screamed below. “It’s awake!”

The tortoise opened its mouth, and the shore folded.

Shi Feng had no other word for it. The black stone along the edge of the lake bent like cloth. A family banner, five hunters at a run, was on one side of the fold. Then all five were somewhere else, three hundred paces up the far wall, tumbling down the steps. One of their jade tokens flared red. Then a second.

“Shattering Void-grade,” Yue Shaoan whispered. “That’s a Shattering Void-grade beast. Brother Shi, we’re not fighting that, are we? Please say we’re not fighting that.”

“We’re not fighting that,” Shi Feng said. “Now be quiet and smell.”

The tortoise folded the shore again and again, wherever anyone ran. Men were thrown up the walls, into the water, into each other. The Cangming banner pulled back up the slope in good order. The Third Prince’s banner didn’t. It went along the shore toward the tortoise’s head, and Shi Feng lost it in the dark.

Yue Shaoan had shut his eyes. His nose twitched.

“There,” Yue Shaoan said suddenly. “Under the head. In the shallows. It smells...” He frowned. “It smells like nothing. It smells like the inside of a quiet room.”

Shi Feng looked where Yue Shaoan pointed and saw what he’d missed.

Everywhere the tortoise looked, space bent. But in a ring of water around its own shell, nothing bent at all. The light on the lake lay perfectly still there. In the stillest part of it, right below the tortoise’s chin, a white flower stood on the water.

It had nine petals.

“Stay here,” Shi Feng told Yue Shaoan. “If anything folds near you, crush your token.”

He stepped off the shore onto the lake.

Riverless Step at Perfection didn’t care whether the water was still or moving. He went across the glassy surface in long, quiet strides. Twice the shore folded behind him, and twice he felt the pull on his back. Then he crossed into the ring around the shell, and the pull stopped.

The Nine-Petal Quiet Soul Lotus was the size of two cupped hands. Its petals were white, faintly blue at the root, and its smell was exactly as Yue Shaoan had said: nothing, and peace.

Shi Feng cut it at the stem, wrapped it in oiled cloth and put it inside his robe, next to the hairpin.

For a man who counts, Shi Feng thought. Done.

Then he looked up to see why the ring was still.

The tortoise’s shell rose above him, huge and old. On its very top, among the ridges, a stone was set into the shell. It was the size of a man’s fist, grey streaked with white, and the air around it was so still that the faint mist off the lake parted to go round it.

A Void-Anchor Stone.

So that was why the lotus grew here, Shi Feng thought. The beast folded everything it looked at, except the one spot on its own back.

Shi Feng had read the name in the princess’s vault catalogue, under the items she didn’t have. A Shattering Void tribulation tore at the space around a man. Whoever held this stone through it held the space still.

It was exactly the treasure his tribulation needed.

He set his foot on the first plate of the shell to climb.

Above him, a long cut opened in the air, black and edged with white. A big man in a fur-trimmed coat stepped out of it onto the ridges beside the stone. He had an axe on his shoulder with a head as wide as a door.

“Princess’s cook,” Helian Ba said, looking down. “You’re late.”