Chapter 905 — Anvil Bells

CHAPTER 905

Anvil Bells

A blade that couldn’t be heard needed a yard full of noise.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword from his ring and laid his left palm flat along it. The Thousand Forge Flame Art ran out of his hand, and inside it he struck the Second Anvil Fire.

The first beat hit the blade like a hammer.

Clang!

The fire went up the steel from guard to tip, red and then white, and the silence around him cracked. He heard the cook fire, Hao Dafu mid-shout, and the mules kicking their stalls.

He struck again. Clang! And again. Clang!

He didn’t stop. The Second Anvil Fire ran in a fixed count, nine beats and a rest, the way a smith works a bar on the anvil. Each beat poured more heat into the sword and threw more light across the stones, until the whole yard was lit red from the gate to the cliff edge.

“What’s he doing?” Lao Qi shouted. “Is he forging a sword in the middle of a fight?”

“He’s lighting the place up!” the young guard shouted back. “So the bastard can’t hide!”

That was half of it. The other half was the beat. The Second Anvil Fire was qi struck in rhythm, and every beat rolled out through the air in a ring. The Silent Night Blade could swallow sound, but it couldn’t swallow a beat of qi. Wherever the ring met the folded edge of its silence, the fold rang back like a struck bell.

On the seventh beat, a patch of air to his right rang.

Shi Feng turned and cut.

The grey Sword met the thin blade a hand’s breadth from his hip. Sparks burst between them, and for one instant the masked man was there in the red light, his blade caught. His mask turned toward the sword. He hadn’t expected it to be there.

“Clever,” the masked man said.

“It’s just loud,” Shi Feng said.

The masked man slid off the bind and vanished again.

Shi Feng kept beating. Eight. Nine. Rest. One. His left side was going numb now, and every beat he poured into the blade came out of qi he couldn’t spare. A mid Shattering Void cultivator’s sea of qi was deep, but it wasn’t bottomless, and the man in the mask stood a full stage above him at late Shattering Void.

The fold rang behind him, low and to the left.

He didn’t turn. He stepped forward, and the thin blade went through the place where his back had been.

But the masked man hadn’t only been cutting. Everywhere he’d stepped, he’d left a pocket of folded silence behind him on the stones, grey patches a pace or two wide, scattered across the yard between the wagons. Shi Feng had seen the first one swallow a driver’s dropped boot without a sound. If he put his foot into one, he’d lose his footing and his hearing at the same time, and the next cut would come out of the quiet.

The man was building a yard full of holes, and waiting for Shi Feng to step in one.

So Shi Feng stepped in one on purpose.

Riverless Step at Perfection didn’t need a river anymore. It walked on anything that flowed, and folded space flowed where it had been stitched shut. Shi Feng put his foot on the seam of the first silent patch and slid across it. Then he slid across the next, and the next, a red light moving through grey holes, and the beats of the Second Anvil Fire rang ahead of him the whole way.

Under the wagons, the drivers forgot to be afraid.

“He’s walking on them!”

“Walking on what? I can’t see anything!”

“Exactly! Nothing there, and he’s walking on it!”

Hao Dafu had finally got under a wagon. He lay flat on his belly with the ladle still in his fist.

“Left! Go left! No, the other left!” Hao Dafu shouted, though nobody could use the advice.

On the far side of the yard, the fold rang sharp and high.

Shi Feng came off the last seam already cutting. The grey Sword went in low, under the masked man’s guard, and opened his black sleeve from the elbow to the wrist. Blood came out of the cut, and for the first time it made a sound when it hit the stones.

The masked man went back five paces and stopped.

He looked at his sleeve. Then he looked at Shi Feng, standing in the forge light with a frozen wound across his ribs and a white-hot sword in his hand.

“Mid Shattering Void,” the masked man said slowly. “I was told you were mid Shattering Void.”

“You were told right,” Shi Feng said. “Whoever told you should have told you the rest of it.”

The masked man didn’t answer that.

Hao Dafu crawled out from under the wagon and set the toll board upright against the wheel.

“Every gate from Tianjing to Grey Goose cut this board,” Hao Dafu said, loud enough for the yard. “Not one of them ever refused the money. Not in twenty-two years.”

Lao Qi’s head came up. “Then he’s not a bandit,” Lao Qi said.

“No,” Hao Dafu said. “He’s not.”

The masked man did not look at the board. He put the thin blade upright in front of his mask, and the air around him changed.

It wasn’t silence this time. It was pressure, the full late Shattering Void pressure he’d been holding back, and it came down on the yard so hard that the forge light bent. The stones under the wagons cracked. A mule screamed in the stable and went quiet.

“Three Doors of Night,” the masked man said.

Space tore open.

One black slit opened in the air to Shi Feng’s left. A second opened to his right. A third opened behind him, so close he could feel the cold coming out of it on the back of his neck.

Out of all three at once came the edge of the same thin blade.