Chapter 914 — The Nine Lanterns

CHAPTER 914

The Nine Lanterns

By noon half of Frost Pass City was standing around the tower square, and the other half was on the roofs.

Qin Wuyan walked once around the middle of the square. Where his feet passed, the snow melted down to the stones in a thin dark line. When he reached his starting point, there was a circle forty paces across, and he stepped outside it and folded his hands in his sleeves.

“Inside the line, the fight,” Qin Wuyan said. “Outside the line, nobody.”

Nobody in the crowd tried to find out what would happen if they crossed it.

Ximen Sheng stood at the north edge of the circle. He’d taken off his mourning band and tied it around his sword hilt. In his left hand he held a coil of bronze chain, and from the chain hung nine small lamps of green bronze, each one burning with a steady white flame.

“The Nine-Lantern Chain,” someone in the crowd said. “He’s going to use it on the first exchange!”

“Captain Ximen once held a whole bandit camp inside those lamps. Nobody got out!”

Shi Feng stood at the south edge with the grey Sword still in its sheath. Pang Yue stood in the front row of the crowd, behind the line, with his arms folded.

“Captain,” Shi Feng said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Ximen Sheng threw the chain.

It didn’t fly at Shi Feng. It flew around him. The bronze links turned to a band of blue qi in the air, and the nine lamps spread out along it and circled him at shoulder height, faster and faster. Wherever their white light fell on the stones, the space under it went tight and still.

Shi Feng felt it at once. He reached for a fold of space to step through, and there wasn’t one. The lamplight pinned the void flat wherever it touched. Void-Crossing Step had nothing to cross.

Shi Feng understood the trap. The lamps restricted spatial movement, forcing Shattering Void cultivators to fight inside the ring. He could break out without using a spatial art.

The ring of lamps tightened. The band of qi swung lower and came across at his knees.

Shi Feng stepped onto it.

Riverless Step was made for water, and at Perfection it could walk on anything that moved the way water moved. The chain was swinging in a circle. It had a current. He set his foot on the band of qi, let it carry him half the way around the ring, and stepped off again in the gap between two lamps, exactly where the light didn’t fall.

“He’s standing on the chain!”

“How can a man stand on a swinging chain?”

Ximen Sheng’s face changed. He jerked the chain back to tighten the ring. The band snapped inward, and all nine lamps came at Shi Feng at once from nine sides.

Shi Feng raised his left arm and let his sleeve fall open.

The Quiet Sleeve Art at Major Success didn’t block force. It took force in and let it die in the cloth. The band of qi wrapped itself into his sleeve, and its whole swing went into the silk and stopped there without a sound. Shi Feng turned his wrist once. The chain tore out of Ximen Sheng’s hand.

The crowd gasped.

But the lamps didn’t fall. Ximen Sheng’s fingers flew through a seal, and the nine lamps tore free of the dead chain and hung in the air around Shi Feng on their own, each one still burning, each one still pinning the space beneath it.

“The lamps are the art,” Ximen Sheng said through his teeth, holding his seal. “Not the chain.”

“Then I’ll break the lamps,” Shi Feng said, drawing the grey Sword.

The light on the blade turned the colour of a setting sun.

Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection opened a seam in anything it touched. Shi Feng cut the first lamp out of the air. The green bronze split down the middle, and the white flame went out. The space under it loosened.

He took one step forward into the space it had freed.

He cut the second lamp. Another step.

Ximen Sheng drove the remaining lamps at him, one after another, faster. Shi Feng didn’t speed up. He cut each lamp as it reached him, and each time a lamp went dark he took one step closer. The fourth lamp’s flame licked his right wrist as it died and left a red burn across the skin. He didn’t slow down.

Five. Six. Seven.

The square was completely silent now.

The eighth lamp split. Ximen Sheng threw the ninth straight at his face, with everything he had left in it.

Shi Feng cut it in half a hand’s breadth from his nose and stepped through the two pieces. Then the grey Sword rested against the side of Ximen Sheng’s throat, and both of them stood still.

The two halves of the ninth lamp hit the stones and rolled.

“Nine lamps,” someone whispered. “Nine cuts.”

“He walked in one step at a time. He didn’t even hurry.”

“That’s the gap between early and mid Shattering Void?”

“That’s not the realm. That’s the man.”

“…”

Ximen Sheng’s breath came hard and white in the cold. He looked at the Sword at his throat, and then up at Shi Feng, and he didn’t beg. His eyes were red with grief and anger. Losing hadn’t changed his belief that he owed his commander this fight.

“Do it,” Ximen Sheng said hoarsely. “The Guard’s rule allows it.”

“It does,” Shi Feng said. “I won’t.”

He lowered the grey Sword and slid it back into its sheath.

“Your commander’s killer isn’t in this square, Captain,” Shi Feng said. “If you want him, look in Tianjing.”

He turned and walked back to the south edge of the circle.

For a moment nobody moved. Then the crowd broke.

“He spared him!”

“The princess’s guest spared the Lantern Guard!”

“A grievance duel, and the man who filed it is still alive. Has that ever happened?”

Ximen Sheng stood there with his empty hands and his mourning band on his sword, and then his knees gave out and he sat down hard in the slush.

Pang Yue stepped over Qin Wuyan’s line. Nobody stopped him. He bent down, pulled his captain’s arm over his shoulder and lifted him to his feet. He looked once at Shi Feng over the captain’s head.

He didn’t say a word. He carried Ximen Sheng out of the square, and the crowd opened for them.

By evening every teahouse in Frost Pass City was telling the story, and in most of them the lamps had become ninety.