Chapter 838 — The Ring on the Ridge

CHAPTER 838

The Ring on the Ridge

“Thirty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said, and pushed the herb rod into the crack in the rock.

Thunder-Gazing Ridge was bare black stone from the shoulder up. Eleven crooked pines clung to its sides, every one split by old lightning, and a roofless hut sat in a fold below the top. The stone was pale with a thousand years of scars. From the summit you could see the capital’s walls thirty li south, grey in the haze.

Shi Feng walked the ring with a bundle of rods under each arm.

Each rod was storm-root and thunder-pine bark bound with copper wire, as long as his forearm. Set in a ring, they’d drink a share of every strike before it reached him. Not a large share. Enough to make the difference between cracked bones and broken ones.

“Thirty-two,” Ji Yuanhe said.

He counted every rod out loud. After the cure, he’d started counting for pleasure.

The princess’s guard captain stood at the edge of the ring with his arms folded. He was a broad, silent man of fifty, at late Shattering Void, with a scar through one eyebrow. He’d climbed thirty li of ridge road behind them that morning without a word.

“Captain,” Shi Feng said, setting the next rod. “Has Her Highness told you what you’re here for?”

“Guard,” the guard captain said.

“Guard what?” Shi Feng asked.

The guard captain looked at Ji Yuanhe.

“The old man,” the guard captain said.

Shi Feng nodded. “Good. Then you should know one thing.” He straightened up and looked at them both. “Once the sky starts, I can’t leave this ring. If anything drags me out before the last strike, the tribulation doesn’t stop. It finishes me wherever I land. That’s the rule. It’s killed better men than me.”

Ji Yuanhe stopped with a rod halfway into the stone.

“Then nobody drags you out,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“Nobody drags you,” the guard captain agreed.

It was the most he’d said all day.

They finished at noon. Seventy-two rods stood in a circle thirty paces across, and in the centre Shi Feng cleared a flat place and sat to test the stone. It was cold and hard. He’d had worse beds.

Then he looked down the ridge, and his eyebrows went up.

The lower slopes were filling with people. They’d been coming since morning, up the ridge road and the goat tracks. Now there were hundreds. Sect juniors in coloured robes had claimed the best boulders. Merchants had set up awnings. Somebody had brought a drum. Two of Liu Su’s runners went from group to group with slates, taking bets. Farther down, someone was selling roasted chestnuts.

Shi Feng looked at the chestnut seller.

“The princess will be furious,” Shi Feng said.

“Why?” Ji Yuanhe asked.

“Because she gave me a ridge so I wouldn’t die in front of chestnut sellers,” Shi Feng said, “and Qu Ming brought the chestnut sellers to the ridge.”

The guard captain looked down at the slopes. His hand moved to the hilt at his waist and rested there.

“Too many,” the guard captain said.

“Too many to watch,” Shi Feng agreed. “Not too many to hide in.”

Ji Yuanhe looked from one to the other, then at the crowds below.

“We should send them home,” Ji Yuanhe said unhappily.

“With what?” Shi Feng asked. “It’s the princess’s land, but the road up isn’t. Half of them are sect disciples, and every sect would complain by tomorrow. And if I clear the slope, the ones who came for me are just the ones left standing.” He shook his head. “No. Let them stay. A crowd is noisy. Noise is useful.”

“How?” Ji Yuanhe asked.

“If anyone moves through it the wrong way,” Shi Feng said, “the crowd will shout about it for me.”

At dusk the cooking fires came out along the slopes like a second set of stars. The smell of oil and scallions drifted up to the ring. Shi Feng stood, stretched, and started down.

“Where are you going?” Ji Yuanhe called after him.

“Supper,” Shi Feng said. “Tomorrow I’ll be busy. And somebody down there is selling noodles.”

The noodle stall stood beside the ridge road below the first boulders, a rough awning over two benches and a pot. It was crowded with sect juniors and gamblers. Nobody recognised him in the dark. He sat at the end of the bench and paid for a bowl.

“They say he’s only Deity Transformation,” a junior at the next bench was saying. “Peak, maybe. Against the Shattering Void sky! He’s dead for sure.”

“My master says only one man in ten lives through it,” another said.

“Then why are you here?”

“To see it!”

Shi Feng ate his noodles. They were good, thick and chewy, with too much pepper.

At the far end of the other bench sat a thin man in an ordinary robe with grey sleeves. He had a full bowl in front of him. The steam had stopped rising from it. He held his chopsticks and didn’t use them.

Grey sleeves. Shi Feng had met grey sleeves once in the Hunt, and those men hadn’t come to eat.

He wasn’t looking at Shi Feng. He was looking up at the ring of rods, black against the sky.

Shi Feng finished his bowl, wiped his mouth, and put down three coppers.

“Uncle,” Shi Feng said to the noodle seller, nodding at the far bench. “That gentleman’s noodles have gone cold.”

The noodle seller glanced over. “He paid, young master. He can eat them cold if he likes.”

“He isn’t going to eat them,” Shi Feng said.

He stood up and walked back up the ridge without looking round. Nobody walked thirty li out of the capital for a bowl of noodles and then left it full.

When he looked down from the ring an hour later, the bench at the end of the stall was empty. The bowl was still there, full, in the lamplight.