Chapter 827 — A Void of Your Own

CHAPTER 827

A Void of Your Own

Helian Ba came up the shell in three strides and swung.

The rift opened at his axe and ran straight at Shi Feng’s chest. Then, an arm’s length from the stone in Shi Feng’s hand, it slowed. The black line crawled through the air like a cart in deep mud. Shi Feng had time to look at it, step to one side, and watch it close.

Helian Ba stared at the place where it had died.

“So that’s what it does,” Helian Ba said.

“It seems to,” Shi Feng said. “I’ve only had it for ten breaths.”

He’d hoped the big man would take a few more swings to work it out. Helian Ba took none. He didn’t swing at Shi Feng again. He swung at the shell under Shi Feng’s feet, two arm’s lengths away, outside the stone’s reach.

The plate split in half, and Shi Feng dropped.

He fell through the gap onto the lower plate, and as he fell, the second rift came. Helian Ba had cut it low and early, at the place Shi Feng would land, not where he was. Shi Feng twisted in the air. The black line still found him.

It went across his left side, just below the bruised ribs. The golden bones held. Near the stone the rift had slowed again, so it cut instead of parting him in two, and the flesh around the old bruising opened. Blood ran down his hip at once, hot and fast.

He landed on one knee and came up anyway.

Helian Ba was right there, axe already drawn back for the third. Shi Feng didn’t wait for it. He lit the grey Sword and drove the Sunset-Splitting Sword straight up into the big man’s guard, close enough that the rift had no room to open.

Red light poured over the shell.

Helian Ba took it on the haft. It pushed him back a full step, and the light opened his fur coat across the chest, and the skin under it. He grunted. Then he set his feet and pushed back, and the force of an early Shattering Void cultivator came through the haft and drove Shi Feng back two steps for his one.

They stood four paces apart on the shaking shell, both bleeding, and looked at each other.

Shi Feng knew it before Helian Ba said it. The stone had stopped every rift the axe sent near him. The axe had stopped every cut he could land. Neither of them could finish the other, and neither of them needed to. Shi Feng only had to keep hold of the stone until the Hunt ended. Helian Ba had to take it before then. That was the difference between them, and it wasn’t a matter of realm.

“You can’t kill me, cook,” Helian Ba said, breathing hard.

“No,” Shi Feng agreed. “And you can’t take this from me. Kill a hunter and your banner’s struck from the tally. You know that.”

“I know it,” Helian Ba said.

“So we’re both wasting a very good night,” Shi Feng said.

Under them, the tortoise stood up.

It didn’t lift its head this time. It lifted everything. The whole shell rose out of the lake on four huge legs, and water poured off it in sheets. The plates tilted until they were nearly upright. Shi Feng and Helian Ba both went sliding down the shell in a shower of water and chips, and off the edge into the lake.

Shi Feng landed on the water on his feet, by Riverless Step, with the stone still in his fist. Helian Ba landed in it up to his chest and came out swearing.

The tortoise opened its mouth, and the whole shore folded at once.

Then, from the rim of the Crater, a bell rang.

It was deep and slow, and it rolled down the black walls and over the water. The first grey light of dawn was showing along the rim. Up there, on the high step under the seventh Mirror, a warden in Long colours was swinging a bronze bell on a pole.

“The Hunt is ended!” the warden called. “Carry out what you hold! The Hunt is ended!”

The tortoise closed its mouth. Slowly, as if the bell had told it something too, it began to sink back under the lake.

Helian Ba stood in the shallows, dripping, and looked at his axe. Then he looked at Shi Feng. He lowered the axe until its head rested on the black stone.

“What you carry out is yours,” Helian Ba said. “That’s the Hunt’s law. I don’t argue with old laws.”

“Neither do I,” Shi Feng said. “Especially the ones on my side.”

Helian Ba laughed, once, loud.

“Next time, cook,” Helian Ba said, “when you have a void of your own.”

He turned and walked away up the slope toward his banner, the axe over his shoulder. He didn’t look back.

On the Tally Pavilion’s stand, the seventh Mirror showed a big northern man walking away, and a bleeding man standing on the water holding something grey.

“A draw. Against the thirty-ninth!”

“Helian Ba’s early Shattering Void! The cook’s a whole realm under him!”

“He didn’t win. He just didn’t lose.”

“Against Helian Ba, that’s the same thing…”

“…”

Yue Shaoan came down the slope at a stumbling run.

“Brother Shi!” Yue Shaoan shouted. “You’re bleeding! You’re bleeding all down your—”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “I was there.”

He let Yue Shaoan press a wad of cloth against his side and hold it there with both trembling hands. Shi Feng used the time to check what he carried. The Void-Anchor Stone was in his fist. The Nine-Petal Quiet Soul Lotus was inside his robe, in its oiled cloth. Beside it, against his chest, lay the hairpin.

All three were still there.

They climbed out of the Crater in the dawn, slowly. At the gate, Hou Tieshou saw them coming and bellowed loud enough to wake the tortoise again.

“Nine deaths and one life! The cook’s alive!”

Jiao Lanyin stood beside him with her bound arm and her bow in her good hand. She looked at the blood on Shi Feng’s robe for a long moment.

“You took your time,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly.

“It was a big tortoise,” Shi Feng said.

“You’re half dead,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“Half,” Shi Feng said. “I counted.”

The four of them walked out through the black pillars together, and the wardens wrote down what they carried.

At noon, the Tianji scribes would weigh the cores.