Chapter 847 — The Sixth Sky: Shattering

CHAPTER 847

The Sixth Sky: Shattering

The lightning didn’t fall. It poured.

It came through the hole in the sky in one unbroken white flood, as thick as a city gate, and it wasn’t the white of the first sky’s thunder. It was mixed with black. Space came down with it. The hole above the ridge was a hole in the world, and everything beyond it was falling through onto one man.

Shi Feng closed his left fist tighter round the Void-Anchor Stone.

It was a grey stone the size of a man’s fist, cold and heavy, the treasure he’d pulled off a tortoise’s shell in the Old Crater. It did one thing. It held the space around whoever carried it still.

The flood hit him.

Boom!

The sound came a breath after the light, and when it came, it knocked the front rows of the crowd flat on the slope. The ridge stone under the ring cracked in a star thirty paces wide. Every herb rod in the ring burned down to its stub in one instant.

Inside the light, Shi Feng felt his body begin to come apart.

It wasn’t like being burned. Space was tearing through him. His flesh wanted to be in two places at once, then in ten. His skin opened along his arms and his back. Three of his ribs cracked, one after another, and he felt each one go.

The Void-Anchor Stone grew hot in his fist.

Wherever its hold reached, space stopped tearing. His chest stayed in one piece. His spine stayed in one line. The stone was holding the world still around him by force, and the lightning was hitting it, again and again, trying to pull it loose.

His golden bones rang under the flood. They held what they could. What they couldn’t hold, the All-Devouring Physique opened up and swallowed.

The lightning seared every channel it passed through. The Physique took the thunder, the tearing space, the black edge of the void, and pulled all of it into his meridians and down into his body. It was more than he had ever swallowed. He could feel how close he was to his limit. He kept swallowing because stopping would let the tearing space finish its work.

Deep inside him, the Nine-layer pagoda took the rest.

The lightning ran up through it, layer by layer. The first layer held. The fourth groaned. The seventh shook so hard that he tasted blood. Then the flood reached the ninth layer, and the ninth layer held, and the whole pagoda stood steady with heaven’s lightning running through every floor of it.

No one on the ridge saw the hidden pagoda. They saw only the lightning around him and couldn’t know what was holding it.

In his fist, the Void-Anchor Stone cracked.

He felt the crack run through it. Then another. Its hold slipped, and space began to tear at his left arm, from the fingertips up. The skin went black. The burning ran up past his wrist, past his forearm, to the elbow.

Then the stone broke into three pieces in his hand, and the flood stopped.

Everything stopped.

The hole in the sky closed. The black clouds drew back from the ridge in a ring, then broke apart into ordinary grey cloud. A cold wind came across the slope. Thin daylight fell on the cracked stone and the burned-out herb rods, and on the man standing in the middle of them.

He was smoking from head to foot. His left arm was black to the elbow. His robe was gone above the waist.

And he could feel space.

Space no longer felt empty or smooth to him. He could feel where it bent and where it would fold. The pressure that rose off him and rolled down the slope wasn’t the pressure of Deity Transformation anymore.

Early Shattering Void.

The slope exploded.

“Six skies! He took all six!”

“He brought the bandits into his own tribulation and killed them with it!”

“He was peak Deity Transformation this morning! Peak!”

“Isn’t that the princess’s alchemist? The 4 Mark?”

“An alchemist? That was an alchemist?”

“…”

At the north edge, Ji Yuanhe’s cracked voice carried across the slope.

“The princess’s captain,” Ji Yuanhe said, pointing. “He held the north edge for all sixty-four of my numbers. Ask him what came over it.”

The guard captain didn’t look up from his arm.

“I just stood there,” the guard captain said, and went back to standing.

On her flat rock, Madam Liu Su stared at her odds-book. Then she closed it with a snap.

“The house pays,” Liu Su said faintly. “Heaven help me, the house pays.”

On his boulder, Helian Ba stood up and put his axe on his shoulder. He looked at Shi Feng across the cracked ring for a long moment.

“Three days,” Helian Ba said.

He turned and walked off down the ridge path. Nobody stood in his way.

At the edge of the crowd, under his parasol, Qu Ming had stopped fanning himself. His face was white. The Azure Sun juniors around him were all talking at once, and he didn’t hear a word they said. He looked at the man in the ring, then turned and left without speaking. The junior holding the parasol had to run to keep up.

Shi Feng opened his fist.

Three grey pieces of stone lay in his black palm, cold and dead. The Void-Anchor Stone had done exactly what it was for, once. He tipped the pieces into his ring anyway.

At the north edge, Ji Yuanhe was sitting on the ground. He’d sat down at some point and didn’t seem to know when.

“Master Ji,” Shi Feng said. His voice came out as a croak. “You can get up now. It’s finished.”

“I know,” Ji Yuanhe said. “I’m waiting for my legs to agree.”

The plain black carriage had moved up to the edge of the ring. Long Caili stood beside its open door. She looked at his black arm, at the blood running down his side, and at the cracked stone under his feet. She studied the injuries. Above the veil, her eyes didn’t soften.

“You held,” Long Caili said coolly. “I’ll admit that much. Now get in the carriage. You’re bleeding on my ridge.”