Chapter 867 — Sunset on the Steps

CHAPTER 867

Sunset on the Steps

The last lotus didn’t fly at him. It grew.

It opened on the seventh tier with Baili Xuan at its heart, and its white-hot petals spread down the steps and up the walls on either side. In three breaths it covered the fifth tier to the eighth, from wall to wall. The whole stairway to the doors was sealed inside one ball of fire the size of a house.

The heat rolled down to the street. People in the front rows fell back with their sleeves over their faces.

“He’s closed the whole stair!”

“The princess’s man can’t go round it. He can’t go through it!”

Shi Feng stood on the fourth tier, just below the lowest petal. The heat beat against his face. His blistered arms throbbed with it.

The Second Anvil Fire could beat one lotus into time. Not this one. It was too big, and his arms were already finished. Falling Star Sword could fall again, but his rib wouldn’t take a second drop. The Physique might swallow a lotus this size, and then it might burn him from the inside for a month.

So none of those. He needed one stroke, and it had to be the right stroke.

He’d already seen where to put it. On the twelfth beat of the first lotus, the wall had split open along one line. Every lotus had that line, a seam where the petals met and the sealed space was joined. The bigger the lotus, the longer the seam.

He found it now in the white glare. It ran from the bottom right of the ball to the top left, faint as a hair.

Shi Feng took the grey sword in both hands and lowered it to his right hip.

“Young Master Baili,” Shi Feng said. “Last chance. Open it, and I’ll walk past you without touching you.”

From the heart of the lotus, Baili Xuan’s voice came out cracked and furious.

“Pavilion law ends at the threshold,” Baili Xuan said. “So does your sitting!”

“Then I’m sorry about your sleeves,” Shi Feng said.

Sunset-Splitting Sword.

It was one stroke, from low on the right to high on the left. It was his sharpest art, and at Perfection it didn’t cut what was strong. It cut where a thing was joined. The grey blade rose along the hair-thin seam. Its red light followed the join from one end of the lotus to the other.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the house-sized lotus fell open along the seam in two halves, and the heat spilled out of it all at once and rolled away harmlessly into the evening air.

The petals faded. The steps were stone again, black and smoking.

Baili Xuan was kneeling on the seventh tier.

He hadn’t been cut. The stroke had passed a hand’s width from his face and gone through only the seam. But all his fire had been in that lotus, and when it opened, there was nothing left in him to hold him up. His arms hung bloody at his sides. His red robe was in tatters. He stared at the stone in front of his knees as if he didn’t know how he’d got there.

The street was completely silent.

Then it exploded.

“He broke it! He broke the whole thing!”

“One cut! One cut!”

“Early Shattering Void beat mid! And Baili Xuan is twenty-first on the Tianxing!”

“Fortune turns like a wheel!”

“Baili Xuan’s kneeling! Elder Qu Hanshan’s own disciple is kneeling on the Pavilion steps!”

“…”

On the wall to the left of the steps, a man in a plain grey robe sat with a little book on his knee, writing quickly. He had a brush behind his ear and a Tianji Mansion seal on his sleeve. He just wrote, looked up at Shi Feng, and wrote some more.

Shi Feng put the grey sword back in his ring.

He walked up the steps, past Baili Xuan. He didn’t look at him. When he came level, he slowed for one step.

“Tell your master the counter’s still open,” Shi Feng said. “He’s welcome to watch me sign.”

Baili Xuan’s shoulders shook, and he said nothing.

Ji Yuanhe came running up the steps behind him with the cloth bag in both arms. The guard captain came two steps behind Ji Yuanhe, close enough to catch him if he tripped.

“Master Shi,” Ji Yuanhe said, breathing hard. “Your arms. Your side. You’re bleeding.”

“I can still write,” Shi Feng said. “Give me the bag. The clock’s nearly out.”

The outer counter stood just inside the doors, behind a long table of black wood. Junior Keeper Si Jiahe was there with the register open. He’d clearly been watching through the doors, because his face was a little pale, but his bow was perfect.

“Honoured guest,” Si Jiahe said politely. “The fees, please.”

Shi Feng opened the bag and laid out the notes. Six bundles of a million each, sealed with Pavilion paper. Si Jiahe counted them aloud, every bundle, while half the street crowded the doors behind to watch.

“Six million,” Si Jiahe said. “Received.”

[Cash: about 6.36M]

He turned the register around and held out the brush.

Shi Feng took it. His fingers stiffened around the brush, and the broken blisters stung when he moved his wrists. Blood ran down onto the paper as he wrote. He signed his name under the two Marks, Shi Feng, steady and plain, with a red smear beside it.

Si Jiahe waited until he’d lifted the brush before sanding the signature. He was careful not to smear the blood across the two declared Marks.

Outside, the sunset bell began to ring.

Shi Feng put down the brush and looked at the smear of blood next to his name.

“I’m sorry about the page,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll bring clean hands to the sitting.”

Si Jiahe bowed very deeply.

By nightfall the whole capital knew. In the Tianji Mansion’s capital office, a man in a grey robe copied one line into a ledger, Baili Xuan, twenty-first, defeated, and wrote another name under it. Nobody else in the city was thinking about the Tianxing. They were all talking about the steps.

That night in the Willow Ford courtyard, Shi Feng sat under the eaves with both arms in a basin of cold water. The burns hurt. The rib hurt more.

But something else was there too. Deep inside him, Baili Xuan’s sealed lotus was still standing, wall after wall of it, pressing in.