Chapter 845 — The Falling Star

CHAPTER 845

The Falling Star

The grey pocket enclosed Shi Feng’s head and shoulders.

He could see through it. The thin man stood outside it, eight paces away, with his right hand closed into a fist. Beyond him the smoke hung motionless in the air. Inside the pocket there was no air at all, no sound, and no movement. It was a small piece of dead space, folded off from the rest of the world.

Ash-Tide Rift. Shi Feng had never seen the art, but he understood it in one breath, because he couldn’t take one.

His qi slowed at once. Each circulation dragged through his meridians, slower than the last. A cultivator’s qi needed the breath to turn, and the pocket had taken the breath away. Above the ridge, the last threads of the fourth sky were still drifting down. If his qi stopped before they landed, the threads would cut him apart the way they’d cut the two grey men.

“It doesn’t take long,” the thin man said. Shi Feng couldn’t hear the words. He read them on the man’s lips, through the thin grey veil. “Twenty breaths. Fewer, at the end of a tribulation.”

Shi Feng swung the grey Sword sideways at the pocket wall.

The blade struck grey nothing and slid along it. The force went round the curve of the pocket and came back at him from the other side, folded back on itself. The flat of his own sword hit him across the ribs.

He swung again, the other way. The same thing happened.

Outside, the thin man waited patiently.

Shi Feng’s chest burned. His vision was going dark at the edges. Every cut he made across the pocket curved round its walls and came back to him. The walls were folded. They turned anything that crossed them.

Then he looked down.

The pocket had a floor. It sat across his collarbones, a flat grey plane where the dead space ended and his body began. The walls curved. The floor didn’t. It was flat, because it had to fit around a living body, and nothing that came straight down onto it would be folded aside.

He raised the grey Sword straight above his head.

The Falling Star Sword came from the princess’s vault. It was a Deity Transformation-grade art, and it had only one stroke: the sword fell from above the head, straight down, like a stone dropped from a cliff. He had reached Entry in it at the start of the Hunt. At Entry he couldn’t aim it at anything that was moving or to the side of him. He could only drop it.

He didn’t need to aim. The floor was right under him.

He let the sword fall.

It went down through the inside of the pocket along the line of his own body, a finger’s width in front of his nose, and struck the grey floor at his collarbones.

The floor broke.

There was no sound, because there was no air to carry it. The whole pocket simply cracked from the bottom up, like ice under a hammer, and collapsed. Air rushed back into Shi Feng’s mouth so hard it hurt. Sound came back all at once: the hum of the clouds, the clash of the captain’s saber, the crowd screaming on the slope.

Eight paces away, the thin man cried out.

The art was tied to his hand. When the pocket broke, all its folded force came back along the art into his fist. Shi Feng heard the bones of the thin man’s forearm go, one, two, three, a sharp series of cracks, and the arm bent in a place where arms don’t bend.

“He broke it from inside!”

“The late Shattering Void one’s hurt! A peak Deity Transformation hurt a late Shattering Void!”

“What sword art was that?”

“It just fell! It just fell straight down!”

The thin man held his broken arm against his chest. For the first time, his mild eyes showed something above the veil. They were wide with shock at the broken arm, and the pain had driven the calm out of them.

Shi Feng took a step toward the south edge of the ring, breathing hard.

“You’re still here,” Shi Feng said hoarsely. “Then I haven’t finished with you.”

Behind him, something moved fast.

One of the two grey men at the north edge had broken away from the guard captain. He came round the outside of the ring at a run, bleeding from the thigh, with a short sword raised for Shi Feng’s back. The captain shouted. He couldn’t follow without leaving Ji Yuanhe alone with the other.

Shi Feng heard it and knew he couldn’t turn in time.

He didn’t have to.

Helian Ba stood up from his boulder.

He didn’t hurry. He took one step and swung his axe once, low and level. The Void-Splitting Axe split space along its edge. The air in front of the blade opened in a long black line, and the grey man ran straight into the line and came out of it in two pieces.

Helian Ba lowered the axe.

“He’s mine to finish,” Helian Ba said to the body. Then he went back to his boulder and sat down again, with the axe across his knees.

“Heavens…” Liu Su breathed on her flat rock. She’d stopped writing in her book.

The thin man looked at the body. Then he looked at Helian Ba, who didn’t look back.

He cut the air with the two fingers of his good hand. A rift opened beside him, and he stepped into it without a word. It closed behind him. On the rock where he’d been standing, a few drops of blood steamed in the cold.

At the north edge, the last grey man saw he was alone.

He didn’t try to run. He bit down hard on something in his cheek. The guard captain’s saber was at his throat a breath later, but he was already falling. He was dead before he reached the ground.

The guard captain stood over him, breathing hard, then looked across at Shi Feng.

“Five dead,” the guard captain said. “One fled.”

“I saw,” Shi Feng said.

“Thank you. I’ll remember it,” Shi Feng said, looking across at Helian Ba.

“Don’t thank me,” Helian Ba said. “Finish your sky.”

Overhead, the last threads of the fourth sky faded out. The clouds didn’t thin this time. They darkened into a perfect, even black.

Then every sound on Thunder-Gazing Ridge stopped.