Chapter 840 — The First Sky

CHAPTER 840

The First Sky

The first bolt was white, and as thick as a well.

It came straight down out of the centre of the clouds and hit Shi Feng on the crown of his head.

Boom!

The sound hit the slopes a moment later, and a thousand people flinched together. The flat stone under Shi Feng split from one side to the other with a loud crack. Around the ring, the herb rods flared blue as they drank their share, and the copper wire on them glowed.

Shi Feng was still sitting.

The lightning had gone in through his skull and down his spine, and every bone in his body had taken it. His bones were golden, all of them, since his Bone Refinement long ago, and they rang. He could feel it in his teeth. The deep note filled his skull. He kept his jaw loose and let the force pass through instead of locking his teeth against it.

He could have met the bolt with qi. Most men did. But this first sky didn’t test qi. It was plain thunder, the heaviest kind there was, and it asked one question: was the body strong enough to carry Shattering Void? Qi thrown in the way would only make the sky ask harder.

So he let his body answer.

“One!” someone shouted on the slope.

The second bolt came down three breaths later. The third followed it. The crowd started to count aloud together, the way the capital counted clouds over a furnace.

“Four!”

“Five!”

“Six!”

At the ninth bolt the stone under him split again, crosswise, and he sank an inch into the ridge. His robe was smoking. The skin on his shoulders had begun to crack, thin red lines opening along the tops of his arms where the lightning came out.

“Nine!”

“He’s just sitting there!”

“That’s Shattering Void thunder, and he’s only at Deity Transformation! A whole realm below it, and he’s taking it on bare bone!”

“Is he even conscious?”

Shi Feng was very conscious. Every bolt burned all the way through him, and every bolt left something behind. The thunder didn’t just strike. It pressed. Each strike packed his bones denser, and they grew heavier beneath the burning flesh. The first sky was changing what his body could endure.

The tenth bolt. The eleventh. The twelfth was heavier than the rest, and his whole body jerked with it.

On her flat rock, Madam Liu Su put down her parasol and picked up her brush.

“Twelve strikes and still sitting!” Liu Su called out to her queue. “Heaven’s will is hard to guess, my dears! The book moves! Dies on the ridge, even money! Lives, three to one!”

A groan went up from everyone who’d bet early.

On his boulder, Helian Ba hadn’t moved since the first strike.

“Good bones,” Helian Ba said, to nobody in particular.

The guard captain, standing beside Ji Yuanhe, glanced at him and then back at the ring.

Ji Yuanhe was too frightened to count. He pressed both fists against his mouth, watching the next bolt gather. Every time the light came down, his whole body flinched, and every time it lifted and Shi Feng was still sitting, he let out a small breath through his knuckles.

“Eighteen!”

“Nineteen!”

By the twentieth bolt a third of the herb rods had burned out. They stood around the ring black and smoking, and each one that died meant a little more lightning reached him. The cracks on his shoulders had joined up and spread down his back. He could smell his own hair burning.

“Twenty-seven!”

That one was a double bolt. Two white columns came down at once, side by side, and met inside him. Shi Feng’s head went back. For one breath his vision was pure white, and the ringing in his bones turned into a scream.

When he could see again, he was still sitting. There was blood in his mouth. He swallowed it.

“He’s still up!”

“Twenty-seven, and he’s still up! What kind of body is that?”

“A water buffalo would be cooked by now!”

“…Twenty-eight,” someone said weakly, as the next one came down.

In the red palanquin at the crowd’s edge, the curtain was being held open by a hand that wasn’t moving at all.

“Thirty-three!”

“Thirty-four!”

“Thirty-five!”

The thirty-sixth bolt didn’t come at once.

The clouds overhead drew together. They pulled in tighter around the centre, and the glow there grew brighter and brighter until it hurt to look at, and the whole slope went silent. Even the drum stopped. Everyone understood without being told. This was the last strike of the first sky, and it was being gathered from all the others.

Shi Feng set both palms flat on the broken stone and straightened his back.

The thirty-sixth bolt came down.

Boom!

The ridge shook from end to end. Pebbles leapt on the slopes. The herb rods flared all round the ring, and most of them burned to the wire. Only twelve were left standing. The flat place where Shi Feng sat broke into five pieces and sank a hand’s width into the mountain.

The light faded.

Shi Feng was still sitting in the middle of the broken stone. His robe hung off him in scorched strips. His shoulders and back were cracked all over, and smoke rose from his hair.

He coughed. A mouthful of blood came out and spattered on the stone in front of him.

Then he looked up at the clouds and grinned.

“That’s one,” Shi Feng said.

On the slopes, a thousand people let out their breath at the same time.

“He’s alive! Thunder shakes the hundred li, and he’s still alive!”

“Thirty-six strikes! He sat through all thirty-six!”

“He’s laughing at it! He’s actually laughing at the sky!”

On the flat rock, Liu Su’s brush was moving again.

“The first sky’s passed!” Liu Su called, and her voice had gone a little higher than before. “The book moves again! Lives, even money! Dies, even money! Even money, my dears! Who wants it?”

Nobody answered her at once. The whole queue was looking up.

The clouds hadn’t broken. They hadn’t even thinned. Nine li of black hung over the ridge, waiting.

Shi Feng put one hand on the broken stone and stood up. His legs held. He spat the rest of the blood out of his mouth and rolled his shoulders, and the cracked skin on them split a little wider.

Then the air beside his left ear went very cold.