Chapter 846 — The Fifth Sky: Silence

CHAPTER 846

The Fifth Sky: Silence

There was no ridge.

Shi Feng hadn’t moved from the herb-rod ring, but he couldn’t feel its stone. Cold, smoke and pain were gone. There was neither light nor darkness, and no direction he could recognise.

He spread his Spirit Sense. It went out and found nothing, and it didn’t come back with an edge. It simply went on and on.

So this was the fifth sky. It didn’t strike the body. It took away every sense of place, and left a man floating in nothing until he forgot where he’d been standing.

Shi Feng tried to step, but couldn’t tell whether he’d moved a pace or a li. With no floor or distance to feel, he could walk out of the ring and face the sixth sky unprotected.

He stopped.

If he walked, he might die. If he stood still, the silence would wear him away. He could feel it starting. He struggled to hold his own name clearly in his mind; even that was becoming hard to remember.

He stood very still and listened.

On the slope, the crowd had crept back from the treeline. They stood in a ragged line below the ring and stared at the man in the middle of it.

“What’s he doing?”

“Nothing. He’s just standing there.”

“The fifth sky takes the senses,” an old cultivator said, very quietly. “My master’s master went into it and came out mad. He spent his last forty years shouting for his mother.”

“Life and death are up to heaven now.”

“…”

At the north edge, the guard captain had torn a strip from his own robe and was tying it round his bleeding arm with his teeth. Ji Yuanhe stood beside him, looking at Shi Feng’s face. Shi Feng had told him to count, and so he counted.

“Forty,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Forty-one. Forty-two.”

His voice was thin and cracked. He wasn’t counting strikes now, because there weren’t any. He was counting the way he’d counted in the Pill Pit, chained to a black iron furnace: one number for every beat of a furnace fire.

The guard captain put a hand on his shoulder.

“Master Ji. Step back from the ring,” the guard captain said. “You’re too close.”

“He told me to count,” Ji Yuanhe said, and didn’t step back. “Forty-six.”

The guard captain didn’t step back either. He planted himself on the north edge with his torn robe and his saber down, between the ring and the crowd, and the crowd behind him stayed where it had been put. When a boy crept past his elbow, the captain put him back without turning his head.

Behind them, wheels crunched on the ridge path.

A carriage had come up the slope without anyone seeing it arrive. It was black lacquer, plain, with no banners and no crest. Its horses steamed in the cold. The door opened, and Long Caili stepped down in a dark travelling cloak with her hood back and her veil drawn from brow to chin.

The guard captain turned and bowed at once, holding his bloody arm.

“Your Highness,” the guard captain said.

“Report,” Long Caili said.

“Six bandits came through a rift in the lull, Your Highness,” the guard captain reported. “Five dead. Their leader fled with a broken arm. Master Shi pulled two of them into the fourth sky.”

Long Caili looked past him at the motionless figure in the ring. Her eyes didn’t change.

“And the fifth sky?” Long Caili asked.

“It took him when Master Ji started counting,” the guard captain said. “He hasn’t moved since.”

“I see,” Long Caili said, watching the ring.

“Your Highness,” the guard captain said carefully. “You told the household you would not come up the ridge.”

“I came to inspect the investment,” Long Caili said coldly. “I paid for this ridge. I’d like to know if I’ll have to pay for a funeral on it.”

The guard captain said nothing. He’d served her long enough to know when not to.

“Fifty-one,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Fifty-two.”

“Should I move him back, Your Highness?” the guard captain asked, glancing at Ji Yuanhe.

Long Caili watched Ji Yuanhe for a moment.

“Let him count,” Long Caili said. “Don’t touch him.”

In the nothing, something came through.

It was faint at first, and Shi Feng almost missed it. It wasn’t light, and it wasn’t a place. It was a voice, thin and cracked, and it was saying numbers.

“Fifty-five. Fifty-six,” Ji Yuanhe counted, his cracked voice faint in the silence.

Shi Feng knew that rhythm. He’d heard it through a stone wall for months in the Pit, one number to each beat of a furnace that never went out.

There was no up and no down. But there was a voice, and the voice came from somewhere.

Shi Feng turned toward it and walked.

He couldn’t feel his feet land. He walked anyway, one step on each number, the way he’d once fed a furnace on the old man’s count. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. The voice grew louder. Sixty. Sixty-one. It cracked badly on sixty-two, and kept going.

Cold came back into his face. Then pain came back into his arm, and he’d never been so glad to feel it. Stone formed under his heel.

His eyes cleared on Thunder-Gazing Ridge, three paces from the north edge of the ring, and looked straight into Ji Yuanhe’s face.

The old man’s lips were still moving.

“Sixty-four,” Ji Yuanhe whispered.

“You can stop now, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said hoarsely. “I came home on your count.”

Ji Yuanhe’s mouth trembled. He stopped counting.

Behind him, Shi Feng saw the plain black carriage and the woman standing beside it. Long Caili met his eyes for one breath and then looked up at the sky, unwilling to let him see her relief.

“You came,” Shi Feng said.

“The rent was paid,” Long Caili said. “Finish it.”

Above the ridge, the perfect black cloud cracked down the middle. Through the crack there was no sky, only a hole, and lightning was pouring through it.