Chapter 842 — The Third Sky: the Folded Sky

CHAPTER 842

The Third Sky: the Folded Sky

The first bolt of the third sky came from six directions at once.

It was one bolt. Shi Feng saw it leave the cloud above him as a single white line. Then the folded sky took it, and it arrived from the front, from behind, from both sides, from above and from under his feet, all in the same instant.

Boom!

He was thrown nowhere, because every side pushed equally. He simply stood there and burned. Six strikes landed on one body, and his golden bones rang so hard his teeth hurt.

When the light cleared, he was still on his feet. His robe was smoking in six places.

“Six sides!” a junior shrieked on the slope. “It hit him from six sides!”

“That isn’t lightning. That’s an execution!”

“How do you dodge something that comes from everywhere?”

“You don’t…”

“One,” Ji Yuanhe said at the north edge of the ring, loudly, as he’d been told.

Shi Feng wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand and looked at the clouds. Heaven had folded the sky into six layers, and every bolt it dropped through them came out of all six. There was no gap to step into. Riverless Step could keep him on moving ground, but it couldn’t move him to a place the bolt wasn’t.

Then he would bend the bolt instead.

He breathed out heat. The Thousand Forge Flame ran out through his skin, and the cold mist that the clouds had dropped over the ridge turned to steam around him in a white shell. Mo’s Steam Fold was the trick he’d used a thousand times over a furnace lid. It folded steam on the beat, and anything inside the steam bent with it.

The second bolt came down.

The steam folded. The bolt from the front bent a hand’s breadth aside and struck the stone beside his foot. The other five didn’t bend at all. They went through the steam as if it weren’t there and hit him in the back, the sides, the crown of his head and the soles of his feet.

Shi Feng went down on one knee.

The crowd roared.

“He’s down!”

“Two to one, did I say? Even money now!” Liu Su shouted, writing fast.

At the edge of the crowd, Qu Ming had stepped down from the red palanquin and stood under a parasol held by an Azure Sun junior, fanning himself slowly.

“The bumpkin should have stayed a cook,” Qu Ming said, loud enough for the juniors around him to hear. “The third sky is where his luck runs ou—”

The third bolt hit, and Shi Feng stood up through it.

Qu Ming’s fan stopped.

Shi Feng wasn’t listening to any of them. In the middle of the second strike, with five bolts burning through his skin, he’d understood why the fold had failed.

Mo’s fold bent the steam. The steam bent the light inside it, and the bolt from the front followed the light. But heaven hadn’t folded steam or light. It had folded the space itself, and the bolt hadn’t bent at all. It had gone straight along a road that was folded.

A fold was space, not steam.

Everything he’d done with Mo’s art had been a picture of a fold. Heaven was showing him the real thing six times a breath.

“Three,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Master Shi, you’re bleeding from the ears.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “Keep counting. I want to watch the next two.”

The guard captain beside Ji Yuanhe turned his head sharply.

“Watch them?” the guard captain said.

“Watch them,” Shi Feng said. “If I dodge, I learn nothing. It’s going to hit me anyway.”

The fourth bolt came down. This time he didn’t raise the steam or brace his bones. He took it with his eyes open and his Spirit Sense spread as wide as it would go, and he followed the white line all the way down from the cloud.

There. Halfway down, the air creased. The bolt went into the crease as one line and came out of it as six. It didn’t split. The space it ran through had been folded six times over, and the bolt ran straight through every layer.

The fifth bolt came, and Shi Feng took it on purpose.

His knees shook. His skin split along both forearms. He watched the crease open and close, and this time he felt the shape of it, the way he felt a furnace fire through a bronze wall. Space had a grain, and heaven had folded it along that grain.

The sixth bolt came, and he took that one on purpose too.

Inside him, beneath his Spirit Sense, the Nine-layer pagoda creaked.

Nobody watching from the ridge could see it. The nine layers remained his secret. Every one of its nine layers groaned at once under the strain of the folded lightning, but none of them gave way. Something in the lowest layer had felt the shape of the fold and kept it.

Shi Feng let out a long breath of smoke.

“Six,” Ji Yuanhe said hoarsely.

On the slope, nobody shouted. A thousand people stood looking up at a smoking man who had stopped dodging lightning and started studying it.

“He’s learning from it,” Helian Ba said from his boulder. He didn’t sound surprised. “A good blade’s edge comes from the whetstone.”

The juniors near him heard and edged away. Nobody wanted to stand that close to Helian Ba.

Overhead, the folded clouds slowly unfolded. Layer by layer they flattened out and thinned, until the grey daylight came through them in patches, and the cold wind returned to the ridge.

“The lull,” the guard captain told Ji Yuanhe quietly. “There’s half an incense stick before the fourth sky.”

Ji Yuanhe let his hands fall. They were shaking.

Shi Feng sat down cross-legged in the middle of the ring. He took a pill from his ring, swallowed it, and closed his eyes. His left forearm was a raw red mess. His ears still rang. The pill had only half an incense stick to work before the next sky. He kept his eyes closed, unwilling to waste any of that rest watching the crowd.

On the slope, Liu Su closed her odds-book on her thumb.

“Six to four he lives,” Liu Su said, sounding puzzled at herself.

Behind the ring, up the slope, where nobody in the crowd was looking, the air tore open as wide as a door.