Chapter 841 — The Second Sky: Rift Wind

CHAPTER 841

The Second Sky: Rift Wind

The cold beside his left ear didn’t go away.

Shi Feng stood still in the middle of the herb-rod ring. His golden bones were still ringing. Smoke rose from both his sleeves. Around him the last twelve herb rods burned low and steady.

“The first sky’s the easy one,” someone said on the slope. “Just wait.”

Madam Liu Su still had her odds-book open on one arm.

“Even money on the second sky!” Liu Su called. “Wealth is found in danger, gentlemen. Who wants it?”

A few hands went up. Most people kept their silver in their sleeves and their eyes on the clouds.

The black clouds didn’t break. They turned. The ring of cloud, nine li wide, began to rotate above the ridge, and the wind on the slopes died.

Then the cold air beside Shi Feng’s left ear split open.

It made no sound. A thin black line a foot long simply appeared in the air. Beyond it there was nothing at all, not light and not darkness. Wind came out of the crack backward. It didn’t blow. It pulled.

His sleeve went flat toward the line, and his feet slid half a pace across the stone.

So this was the second sky. The Shattering Void tribulation tested a man who wanted to master space by tearing space open around him and trying to pull him through it.

A second line opened beside his right knee. A third opened behind his back. In ten breaths there were dozens of them, black cracks hanging all over the ring, and every one of them was pulling in a different direction.

The ridge began to move.

It wasn’t shaking. The loose grit on the rock streamed toward the rifts in thin grey threads, and the stone under his feet ran toward a dozen mouths at once. A man who stood on it would be carried into the nearest crack.

Shi Feng let his feet settle and stopped fighting the ground.

Riverless Step had reached Perfection on the Mist Marsh tide. It no longer cared whether it stood on water. Anything that flowed was a river to it, and it walked on the surface of the river without being carried. The grit ran out from under his heels toward three rifts at once. His heels stayed where they were.

“His feet!” someone shouted on the slope. “The ground’s running, and he isn’t moving!”

“What movement art is that?”

“Is he standing on the wind?”

On his boulder at the edge of the ring, Helian Ba sat with his axe across his knees. He watched Shi Feng’s feet for a long moment.

“Good feet,” Helian Ba said, to nobody, and said nothing more.

The rifts didn’t stay still. They drifted, closed and opened again somewhere else. Shi Feng stepped round one at chest height, ducked a second, and turned his shoulder past a third.

The fourth opened a finger’s width from his left forearm.

The pull caught his arm before he could move it. He tore it back at once. The arm came free, but the skin from his wrist to his elbow didn’t. It wasn’t cut. It was simply gone, pulled through the crack into nothing, and the raw flesh underneath beaded red in the cold air.

The pain arrived a breath later, white and bright. Shi Feng hissed through his teeth.

“His arm!”

“It took the skin right off!”

“That’s the rift wind. My uncle lost a hand to it at his own tribulation…”

Then, under all the shouting, Shi Feng heard a different sound.

At the north edge of the ring, Ji Yuanhe stood beside the princess’s guard captain with both hands clenched in his sleeves. His lips were moving.

“Nine,” Ji Yuanhe said under his breath. “Ten. Eleven.”

Ji Yuanhe hadn’t needed the count since the night he was cured. He’d slept quietly for weeks. Now he stood at the edge of a tribulation, white to the lips, and fear had brought the count back by itself.

Shi Feng’s good mood left him.

“Master Ji,” Shi Feng called. “Count louder.”

“I… I wasn’t…” Ji Yuanhe said, flinching at being heard.

“I need to hear you,” Shi Feng called. “The sky’s noisy up here. Your voice tells me where the north edge is. Keep me inside the ring, Master Ji.”

The guard captain looked at Shi Feng, then at the old man. He didn’t tell Ji Yuanhe to step back.

“Twelve,” Ji Yuanhe said, out loud. “Thirteen. Fourteen.”

Shi Feng listened, and after a few counts he understood what the old man was counting. Every time a rift opened, Ji Yuanhe said a number. And they weren’t random. A new rift opened every third count, as steady as a furnace beat.

On the next third count, Shi Feng was already moving. A rift opened where his ribs had been. He was a step to its left, standing on running grit as if it were a floor.

“Twenty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said. His voice still shook, but it was steady on the beat.

“He’s dancing between the cracks,” an old cultivator muttered on the slope.

The rifts came faster. Shi Feng moved on every third count and never once looked at the cracks. He only listened. Twice the wind tugged his hair. Once it took a strip of his sleeve. It never caught him again.

On the count of sixty, every rift on the ridge closed at the same moment.

The grit stopped running. The cloud ring overhead stopped turning. Shi Feng stood in the middle of the ring with blood running down his bare forearm and dripping from his fingertips.

“Sixty,” Ji Yuanhe said, and his voice cracked on it.

“Two to one he lives,” Liu Su announced, and crossed something out in her book.

Shi Feng looked up.

The black clouds above the ridge sagged down the middle, slowly, until a deep crease divided them. Then the sky folded in half.