Chapter 885 — Falling Star

CHAPTER 885

Falling Star

The congee had gone cold by the time they left the Glass Hall.

Ji Yuanhe carried the pot anyway, wrapped in a towel and held in both arms, as if it were a 6 Mark pill. He wouldn’t let go of it. Shi Feng walked beside him with a lantern. His sleeves were burned away to the shoulder, and the burns from the Pavilion steps had opened again under the bandages.

The Guest Terrace back lane was empty at this hour. Forty paces ahead, the Terrace gate lamps burned on their posts, and the white line of the Pavilion’s array ran across the stones under them.

Forty paces. After three days and three nights at one furnace, it felt like forty li.

“You should’ve taken the sedan chair,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“Eight hundred silver for forty paces?” Shi Feng said. “I can limp for free.”

Ji Yuanhe almost laughed. Then he stopped walking.

The lantern flame had leaned toward the wall, and there was no wind.

The night bent ten paces ahead, between them and the gate, and a man in grey stepped out of it. Grey cloth covered his face to the eyes, and the pressure of Shattering Void rolled down the lane.

Shi Feng didn’t need to look back. A second pressure had come up behind them, on Ji Yuanhe’s side.

“The pills and the old man,” the grey man in front said. “You can keep the rest.”

“The rest is a lantern and a pot of cold congee,” Shi Feng said. “That’s a bad deal, and I’m not taking it.”

The grey man struck.

His palm opened as it came, and a cold white light grew inside it. Hollow Lantern Palm. Wherever that light touched, qi went out. Shi Feng drew the grey Sword from his ring and met the palm on the flat.

Iron River Sword Art at Perfection led the force aside. The palm slid down the blade and into the lane wall, and a round, dark hole appeared in the brick.

But his arm shook to the shoulder. His qi was a dry well. Three days of fire had emptied even the Physique.

The grey man saw it at once.

“He’s empty!” the grey man called. “Take the old one!”

Behind Ji Yuanhe, the air tore.

A black seam opened in the night a pace behind the old man, as tall as a door. A hand in a grey sleeve came out of it and closed on Ji Yuanhe’s collar.

The congee pot hit the stones and broke.

Shi Feng was six paces away, with a Shattering Void cultivator in front of him. He couldn’t run there in time, so he folded there instead.

Void-Crossing Step at Minor Success held its fold for one breath. One breath was enough. He was beside Ji Yuanhe without crossing the stones between, and his left hand caught the old man’s belt.

The hand in the rift didn’t let go, and the old man’s feet came off the ground.

Through the black seam Shi Feng could see the other end. It opened on a dye-house roof across the canal, thirty paces away and three storeys up. The second grey man knelt on the tiles there with one arm thrust into the rift to the shoulder, pulling.

Thirty paces and three storeys. Too far to reach. Close enough to cut.

Cut the arm, and the man would just open another rift. The man himself had to fall.

Shi Feng raised the grey Sword above his head and brought it straight down into the rift.

Falling Star Sword didn’t cut across. It fell. At Entry, on the Pavilion steps, it had only dropped through a rift. Now it had reached Minor Success, and the stroke kept falling along the fold to where the fold ended.

On the dye-house roof, a line of silver light dropped onto the kneeling man from a clear sky, like a falling star.

He never looked up.

The hand on Ji Yuanhe’s collar went slack. The rift shrank to a thread and closed. Across the canal, a body rolled down the tiles and went into the black water.

Shi Feng turned.

The first grey man still had his palm raised. He looked at the empty air, then at the canal.

Shi Feng coughed, and blood came up. The rib Baili Xuan had cracked on the steps had cracked again, and he felt it grind each time he breathed. Both forearms had split open, and blood ran down the grip.

“Come on, then,” Shi Feng said. “I’ve got one more of those.”

He didn’t. But the grey man had just watched his partner die on a roof thirty paces away, to a sword that never left this lane.

He tore a rift beside him and was gone.

Shi Feng looked at Ji Yuanhe. The old man was standing.

Shutters banged open along the Terrace, and candidates leaned out with lamps.

“Bandits again! On the Terrace lane!”

“That’s the candidate from the glass! He only came out an hour ago!”

“Those were two Shattering Void cultivators!”

“A starved camel is still bigger than a horse. Didn’t you see where that sword went?”

“…”

Three Terrace attendants came out of the gatehouse with lamps and bowed deeply.

“We regret the disturbance, honoured guest,” the eldest attendant said. “The lane will be closed until morning. The watch has been told it was bandits.”

“It was bandits,” Shi Feng said.

He sat down on the Terrace step under the gate lamps, inside the white line, and laid the grey Sword across his knees. Ji Yuanhe sat down beside him. The old man’s collar was torn, and his hands were shaking.

For a long time neither of them spoke.

“I’m sorry about the pot,” Ji Yuanhe said at last, very low.

“I can buy another pot,” Shi Feng said quietly. “I can’t buy another you. Sit inside the line until it’s light.”

The old man looked at him and didn’t argue.

Shi Feng didn’t sleep, and he didn’t joke. He watched the dark end of the lane until the sky over the canal turned grey. Ji Yuanhe dozed off against the gatepost before dawn, and Shi Feng put what was left of his outer robe over him.

When the first light came, a Pavilion runner climbed the closed lane with his lamp still lit, stepped carefully around the broken pot, and bowed.

“Honoured guest, the register opens at the noon bell,” the runner said. “The clerk asks whether you’d like your entry read twice.”