Chapter 839 — The Axe on the Boulder

CHAPTER 839

The Axe on the Boulder

By dawn on the tenth, there were more than a thousand people on Thunder-Gazing Ridge.

Shi Feng counted them roughly from the centre of the ring while the sky turned grey. They covered the lower slopes from the ridge road to the split pines. Sect juniors sat in rows on the boulders. Merchants sold hot buns and ginger tea. On a flat rock halfway up, Madam Liu Su had set up her table again with a parasol over it, and a queue stood in front of her book.

Shi Feng sat cross-legged on the cold stone with the Void-Anchor Stone closed in his left fist. The pressure under his breastbone had been growing all night. Now it pressed on his chest from above.

Ji Yuanhe sat just outside the ring of rods with his knees drawn up. The guard captain stood beside him and didn’t move.

“You should eat something,” Ji Yuanhe said for the third time.

“I had noodles,” Shi Feng said.

“That was last night!” Ji Yuanhe protested.

“They were very filling,” Shi Feng said.

Down the slope, a red palanquin was being carried up the ridge road by eight bearers. The crowd moved aside for it, and it stopped at the very edge of the gathering, below the last of the boulders. The curtain lifted a little. Shi Feng saw red sleeves and a smile.

“He came,” Ji Yuanhe said bitterly.

“Of course he came,” Shi Feng said. “He sent out the invitations.”

Then the crowd on the slope went quiet in a wave, from the bottom up.

A big man was climbing the goat track below the ring. He wore a sheepskin coat with the fleece turned inward, and his black hair was tied back with a leather cord. Across his shoulders he carried a long-handled axe with a head as wide as a door panel. The fleece and the axe were dusted with frost. He’d walked up through the night.

“That’s…that’s Helian Ba!”

“Thirty-ninth on the Tianxing! Early Shattering Void!”

“The northern axe? What’s he doing here?”

“He drew with this one at the Hunt. I heard it from my cousin!”

“He’s come to finish him! Enemies always meet on a narrow road!”

The guard captain stepped forward. His hand closed on his sword hilt.

Helian Ba didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at the crowd either. He climbed the last stretch of the track to a flat grey boulder a few paces outside the ring of rods, sat down on it, and laid the axe across his knees.

Then he looked at Shi Feng.

“I’ll wait,” Helian Ba said. His voice was deep and rough, and he spoke slowly, as if each word cost him something. “Finish it. Then we finish ours.”

The crowd stirred.

Shi Feng looked at him for a moment. There was no trick in that broad face. The man had walked thirty li in the dark to sit on a cold rock and watch.

“You came all this way to watch me die?” Shi Feng asked.

“I came to see you not die,” Helian Ba said. “At the Crater, I said next time, when you have a void of your own. A man shouldn’t say that and then not come.”

“You said you’d come. You came.” Shi Feng held his eyes for a moment. “I won’t forget it.”

Helian Ba grunted. He didn’t seem to know what to do with that, so he ignored it.

“Then let me say one thing as well,” Shi Feng said. “You’re sitting four paces outside my rods. The sky doesn’t care whose knees are where. Move back ten more.”

Helian Ba looked at the ring, at the rods, and up at the sky. Then he picked up his axe, moved to a boulder ten paces further back, and sat down again.

“Ten,” Helian Ba said.

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said.

The guard captain looked at Helian Ba for a long moment. Then he let go of his hilt and went back to standing beside Ji Yuanhe.

The sun didn’t rise.

It should have. The sky in the east had gone pale for a while, and then the pale part went out. A cold wind came up the ridge from the south, and every awning on the slope snapped at once.

“Look up!”

Clouds were gathering over Thunder-Gazing Ridge. They didn’t come in from the horizon the way storm clouds did. They grew out of the empty air directly overhead, black as ink, and turned slowly around the summit. Ring after ring stacked up on each other, wider and lower, until they covered the ridge from end to end and stretched out past it over the fields.

“How wide is that?”

“Nine li! It must be nine li across!”

“My master said Shattering Void clouds are three li! Three!”

“Is it supposed to look like that?”

“…”

Nobody answered the last one.

The pressure on Shi Feng’s chest spread until it pressed on his whole body. The rods around him began to hum, very faintly. The herbs in them were awake. Deep inside him, his qi moved without his leave and settled low in his belly. His body knew what was coming.

Shi Feng opened his left hand and looked at the grey stone once, then closed his fingers around it again.

On the flat rock, Liu Su had stood up. She was staring at the sky with her brush in one hand, and she’d forgotten to write.

In the red palanquin, the curtain had been pulled all the way back.

On his boulder, Helian Ba set both hands on the haft of his axe and leaned forward a little.

Ji Yuanhe stood up.

“Shi Feng,” Ji Yuanhe said. His voice shook.

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “Sit down, Master Ji. You’re outside the rods. Stay there.”

The centre of the cloud ring, directly above his head, began to glow white.