Chapter 880 — A Fold That Holds

CHAPTER 880

A Fold That Holds

The lid jumped a third time. The whole gallery jumped with it.

Under the bronze, nine essences were trying to kill each other. Shi Feng could feel every one of them through his palms. The Frost-Heaven Root pushed cold into the Thunder-Bone Moss. The Thunder-Bone Moss bit back. The three Inner Treasury herbs were heavier than the rest, and they were crushing the lighter ones between them. The Nine-Turn Heart Root was meant to bind them, and it couldn’t do it alone. All nine wanted the middle of the bowl, and there was only one middle.

If he let them fight, one would win. He’d get a 5 Mark pill made of 6 Mark herbs. If he pressed them together by force, all nine would burst.

“They’re going to blow the lid!”

“Hold it down! Use your qi!”

“Qi won’t hold that! Nothing holds that!”

Shi Feng didn’t use his qi.

He thought of a line in Mo’s notes. It was on the last page, written small in the margin in the old alchemist’s crooked hand. Three characters. Fold it left.

For years he’d read it as an instruction about steam. Turn the steam to the left over the lid. It had worked, and he’d thought he understood it.

Since the ridge, he’d known a fold was space, not steam.

He folded the space inside the cauldron.

Not round it, as he’d done in the vault room. Not over the pill, as he’d done in the third sky. Inside the bowl itself. He folded it once, and the bowl held two spaces where there had been one. He folded it again, and again, until the space inside Mo’s cauldron lay in nine small pockets. Each pocket held one essence, alone, with nothing to fight.

The lid stopped jumping.

Holding one fold took his full attention. Holding nine took everything else as well. Blood ran out of his nose and dripped onto the furnace bed, and hissed.

The pockets shook. The essences spun inside them, all nine turning the same way, to the right, the way every essence in a furnace turns. They spun against the walls of the folds and pushed them open.

Fold it left.

Shi Feng turned each fold the other way. He laid the walls of every pocket to the left, against the spin.

Now the harder each essence spun, the tighter it pulled its own walls closed. The more they fought, the better the folds held. He didn’t have to hold them apart any longer. They held themselves.

He almost laughed out loud. Old Mo had known it all along. He’d just never had a fold of real space to try it on.

Shi Feng wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his wrist and let out a long breath.

The nine pockets turned slowly in the dark of the bowl, side by side, touching only at their edges. At each edge, a little of each essence leaked into the next. It was slow and quiet. They weren’t fighting. They were mixing.

Then the pocket on the far side of the bowl began to slip.

It was the heaviest of the three Inner Treasury herbs, and it was dragging its fold wider. He needed his palm on the far edge of the lid, now, and the far edge was on the other side of a cauldron as wide as a cart wheel, in the full heat of the fire.

Shi Feng took one step.

He didn’t cross the stand. The space between the near side of the cauldron and the far side folded, and he was simply there, with his palm already on the far edge of the lid. His robe didn’t even move.

The pocket settled.

The whole gallery cried out at once.

“He moved! Did he move?”

“He didn’t walk! He was there, then he was there!”

“A space step inside a sitting array! At mid Shattering Void!”

“Inside the glass? That’s impossible!”

“…”

Shi Feng stood still for a moment, his palm on the hot bronze.

His Void-Crossing Step had stayed at Entry since the vault room. On the road, it folded a step and let it go at once. Here, for half the night, he’d held nine folds and walked between them, and his feet had learned what his hands were doing. The fold he’d just stepped through had held for as long as he wanted it to.

Minor Success, Shi Feng thought. Strange. The first art I’ve ever improved standing in one place.

“Master Shi,” Ji Yuanhe said, with a crack in his voice. “Your nose.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “It’s fine. It’ll stop when the pill does.”

Behind the glass, Jiang Xu had picked up his brush.

He’d written nothing in his notary’s book for two days. Now he dipped the brush, wrote one line, and put it down again. Old Tower Master Dai leaned over to read it. His eyebrows rose, and he sat back without saying a word.

Xuanyuan Gui didn’t look at the book. He was looking at Shi Feng’s feet.

Shi Feng took his palm off the lid.

He didn’t need it there any longer. Under the bronze, nine pockets of folded space turned in silence, closing themselves tighter with every turn, and the cauldron had stopped making any sound at all.

The hum was gone.

In the gallery, people began to look at each other. They had just watched a mid Shattering Void cultivator fold space inside a sitting array, and none of them had a rule for it.