Chapter 877 — Three Skies

CHAPTER 877

Three Skies

The first sky fell inside the glass.

It came down as one column of white fire, straight through the roof array and onto Mo’s cauldron, and nowhere else. The heat rolled out across the stand and hit the glass wall. The people in the first ring leaned back. The stone under their feet had gone warm.

Shi Feng stood in the column with both palms on the lid.

The fire soaked into his arms and down into his golden bones. They rang under it. He held the lid steady and let the bronze drink the strike. Under his palms the pill pushed up hard, again and again, like a fish against a net.

“Forty breaths,” Ji Yuanhe called from his stool. “It’s thinning.”

The first sky burned out. The black clouds didn’t leave. They drew together over the roof, and a second layer began to form on top of the first.

“A second sky!”

“That’s his record! He called two at the 4 Mark!”

“Two at the 5 Mark? Has anyone ever…”

“Nobody! Not in this register!”

The second sky fell heavier than the first. The glass roof turned white, and three rows of the gallery threw their sleeves over their eyes. The array lines on the floor blazed so bright that the stand looked like it was floating.

At the 4 Mark, he’d held a second sky with Mo’s Steam Fold at Major Success. He’d laid a sheet of steam over the lid and let the lightning spend itself on it. That had been enough for a 4 Mark pill.

It wasn’t enough now. He felt the steam tear on the second strike, and a thread of light leaked out round the rim.

Shi Feng let the steam go.

He folded space instead.

He’d done it once in the princess’s vault room, round the whole cauldron. Now he did it smaller and tighter, inside the lid. A fold of real space, no thicker than a sheet of paper, lay over the pill. On one side of the fold sat the pill. On the other side sat the lightning. The two of them were a finger’s width apart and could not touch.

A fold this small was harder than the big one, Shi Feng thought. The big one had slack in it. This one had none.

The pill stopped pushing. The thread of light round the rim went out.

The second sky burned out over a cauldron that had gone quiet.

In the first ring, Song Wuya stopped writing and looked up.

“He’s not holding it with qi,” Song Wuya said. “He’s holding it with space.”

The examiners beside him stared. One of them turned his page back and read it again, as if the answer might be written there.

The clouds didn’t break. They drew together a third time, darker, and the glass roof groaned.

“A third!”

“Three tribulations! The array can’t…”

“It’ll hold! The Pavilion built it for Profound Heaven!”

“It’s not the array I’m worried about. It’s him!”

The third sky came down slower than the other two. It was thick and red at the edges, and it didn’t strike once. It poured.

Shi Feng held the fold.

The heat went into his arms first. His sleeves caught fire at the elbows and burned up to the shoulders. He didn’t take his hands off the lid to beat them out. The skin of both forearms turned red, then blistered. He’d taken worse on the ridge, but on the ridge he hadn’t had to keep a fold the thickness of paper perfectly still at the same time.

The fold trembled once. He fixed it.

“Ninety breaths,” Ji Yuanhe said. His voice shook, but the numbers didn’t. “Ninety-one. Ninety-two.”

“Keep going, Master Ji,” Shi Feng said through his teeth.

At a hundred and twenty breaths, the third sky burned out.

The clouds over the glass roof broke apart and faded. Grey daylight came back down into the hall. Under the lid, the pill gave one low hum and went still.

Nobody in the gallery spoke. Several people had stood up without knowing it.

Shi Feng lifted the lid.

Three pills lay in the bowl. The first was dark gold and moved faintly, as if it were breathing, and the air above it bent like the air above a summer road. The second was a clean, pale Perfect pill. The third was a cracked grey lump, a waste pill that had given its share of the herbs to the other two.

He reached in with his right hand, took the Perfect pill between two fingers and held it up to the light. Every eye in the hall followed it. His left hand went into the bowl and came out empty. The grey lump was already in his sleeve, where the Quiet Sleeve Art hid it as easily as it hid his qi.

A senior examiner came through the glass gate with a jade tray and lifted the dark gold pill in tongs. His wrist dropped an inch.

“Three tribulations,” the senior examiner said hoarsely. “A Three-Tribulation Pill. At a 5 Mark sitting.”

“The Perfect goes into the record,” Si Jiahe said, writing fast. “The Three-Tribulation Pill returns to the candidate. And the waste, Master Shi?”

“There wasn’t any waste,” Shi Feng said. “It all went into the other two.”

Si Jiahe’s brush stopped. He looked into the empty bowl, then at the Perfect pill still in Shi Feng’s fingers, and wrote the answer down.

Song Wuya looked at the empty bowl, then at Shi Feng’s burnt sleeves, for one breath too long. Then he wrote something and said nothing.

The board-caller climbed his stool and wrote it on the board in large characters.

5 Mark: passed.

Now the gallery exploded.

“Three skies! A mid Shattering Void kid called three skies!”

“Old Master Qu never called one!”

“That’s not a pass. That’s a slap in the face for the whole register!”

In the first ring, the old alchemist was smiling.

In the Azure Sun box, Qu Ming had gone white. Qu Hanshan sat beside him and didn’t move.

Shi Feng didn’t look at either of them. He put the Three-Tribulation Pill in a jade box and the box in his ring. Then he laid his blistered palm flat on the furnace bed.

The Second Anvil Fire was still burning dark red under the cauldron. He didn’t let it drop by even a finger.