Chapter 858 — The Eighth Lock

CHAPTER 858

The Eighth Lock

The Second Anvil Fire beat in his palm, and the array’s light changed.

To his eyes it didn’t change at all. But Shi Feng had spent a year learning to read heat through a furnace wall, one beat at a time, and the flame in his palm was an instrument for that. Every lock was made of qi. Qi under strain was warm. And the flame told him, beat after beat, exactly how warm each wall was.

Each wall burned evenly from edge to edge. Except at the joins.

Where two locks stood side by side, there was a line between their walls no wider than a hair. Each lock sealed the space inside itself. Neither lock sealed the line between them. On every beat of the fire, that line came back a little colder than everything around it.

There, Shi Feng thought. The walls sealed their own space, but neither wall reached into the join. That cold line gave his fold somewhere to land.

Jiang Shen saw the flame and moved at once. He was no fool. His fingers flicked twice, and the fifth and sixth rings slid across the court toward Shi Feng from left and right, rising as they came.

Shi Feng stepped into the join between the third and fourth locks.

Void-Crossing Step folded the cold line against the cold line on the far side of the court, between the first ring and the second. He went through. It was rough and short, and it still knocked the breath from his ribs. But the fold had found unlocked space to land in, and it held.

He came out twenty paces away, behind the fifth lock, as it closed on the space where he’d been.

The Jiang gallery erupted.

“He crossed!”

“Through the joins? You can’t step through a join!”

Jiang Shen’s narrow face went very still. Then his hands came out of both sleeves and moved fast, shifting different rings with each hand. The seventh ring slid out, then the eighth. Lights went up all over the court, and the court began to fill with locks.

Shi Feng read the joins and went through them. Third and fifth. Sixth and seventh. Each step was clumsy, and his foot came down short every time. But the joins were there, a hair wide and cold on every beat, and Jiang Shen couldn’t close a lock against a gap that wasn’t inside any lock.

At the fourth step, Shi Feng landed three paces from the centre ring.

Jiang Shen didn’t retreat. He dropped the eighth lock straight down around Shi Feng, one cube enclosing him on all sides. At the same moment the court’s floor lit up in a line of gold running from ring to ring, all eight of them. Above the court, a ninth wall of light began to form, as wide as the court itself.

So that was the ninth. It wasn’t a ring. It was all eight together, closing everything at once. The eighth lock would hold him in place while the ninth sealed the whole court.

Shi Feng didn’t try to cross out. He looked up.

The eighth lock’s walls met at its top corners, and at each corner the join burned cold.

He jumped, straight up inside the cube, as high as its roof. Then he turned the grey sword point-down and dropped it on the near corner.

Falling Star Sword came down exactly on that cold line.

Crack!

The eighth lock split from its corner to the floor. The light went out of it all at once. The gold line on the floor broke where the eighth ring sat, and above the court the ninth wall flickered, sagged and faded before it had finished closing.

Shi Feng landed in the centre ring, beside Jiang Shen, with the grey sword’s edge resting lightly against his neck.

Silence. The other seven locks hummed and sank slowly back into their rings.

Jiang Shen looked at the cracked bronze ring of the eighth lock. Then he looked at Shi Feng’s bloody mouth.

“I yield,” Jiang Shen said.

The juniors in the gallery all started shouting at once.

“He broke the eighth! Nobody’s ever broken a lock!”

“Elder Brother Shen yielded!”

“…”

Elder Jiang Bozhou rose slowly in the gallery.

“Brushes out,” Jiang Bozhou said, without turning from the court. “The array manual, from the first page, for a season. All of you. Nobody called the centre ring.”

The juniors bent over their knees. Nobody argued.

He looked at the cracked ring for a long while, and then at the veiled princess beside him.

“He cut through the knot with one stroke,” Jiang Bozhou said. “Your Highness, the Jiang family will stand behind the Phoenix Tail Pavilion at court. This old man will say so at the next sitting.”

“Thank you, Elder Jiang,” Long Caili said, inclining her head.

Her voice was perfectly steady. Her hand was still on the rail, and her knuckles hadn’t yet got their colour back.

Shi Feng lowered the sword and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“Elder Jiang,” Shi Feng said, turning toward the gallery. “The tooth was mine. The ring was yours. Let’s call that even.”

Jiang Bozhou laughed.

At the far end of the court there was a small side gallery, half in shadow, that Shi Feng hadn’t noticed when he came in. A man in a plain grey Sky Pavilion robe was sitting there alone, with his hands folded on his knees. Shi Feng had a card in his ring with that man’s name on it.

Jiang Xu didn’t say anything. He looked at the cracked eighth ring, and then at Shi Feng.

Then he smiled, rose and left the gallery without a word.