Chapter 918 — Bandits in the Guest Court

CHAPTER 918

Bandits in the Guest Court

The last lamp in the guest court went out, and four men came over the wall.

Against the snowy pines, Shi Feng saw three grey-robed men with grey sleeve bands. A thin man in black landed last without disturbing the snow.

“Bandits!” a guard shouted somewhere outside. “Bandits at the guest court!”

“Go,” Shi Feng told Chu Ze, without looking at him. “Wake your patriarch.”

Chu Ze ran to obey.

The guest court was thirty paces across, with a frozen fish pond and four dead corner lamps. An eastern moon gate led into the inner halls. The outer gate stood west, toward the slope.

The thin man in black raised one hand, and grey mist poured out of his sleeve.

It rolled across the court low and fast and rose to the eaves in three breaths. It smelled of wet earth. Shi Feng’s Spirit Sense found nothing inside. Walls, pond, men—all were hidden.

Grave-Mist Shroud, Shi Feng thought. He’d heard of mists like this in the Pill Pit. The Heretic Sect used them on men who could sense too much.

“The chief elder’s orders!” a voice shouted from outside the west wall. “The guards hold the outer gate! Hold the outer gate!”

Nobody came through it. Nobody was going to.

Footsteps came running from the east instead. Through the moon gate, Shi Feng heard Hulan elders shouting, and then the shouting stopped at once.

“They are below this one’s realm,” Qin Wuyan said, from somewhere in the moon gate. His voice was perfectly calm. “It is his fight.”

“Senior, the bandits are inside our fort!” a Hulan elder cried.

“Then stand behind this one and watch,” Qin Wuyan said.

The elders didn’t try to get past him.

Something moved in the mist to Shi Feng’s right. He turned, and a blade came out of the grey from his left and cut his sleeve open from the elbow to the wrist. He jumped back. A second blade passed where his neck had been.

He couldn’t see them, and he couldn’t sense them. They didn’t have that problem. The mist was their deacon’s qi, and it knew where everyone in it was standing.

Shi Feng understood. He couldn’t sense the men, but he could expose the qi hiding them.

Shi Feng drew a flame into his palm, folded it back on itself and struck it with the second fold. The Second Anvil Fire rang once, deep and heavy, and the beat of it rolled out through the court in a ring of heat.

The mist glowed.

It was qi, and the beat of the fire went through it the way it went through anything made of qi. The thin parts of the mist glowed a faint dull red. But the mist was thickest where it was wrapped around a living man, hiding him, and there it glowed bright. Shi Feng struck the fire again, and three bright red knots burned in the grey, one by the pond, one by the north wall, one near the south lamp.

There was a fourth glow, very faint, behind the pond. It was so faint it was almost not there.

“He can see us!” a taker shouted. “Deacon Gou, he can see us!”

Shi Feng was already moving.

Void-Crossing Step took him through a fold of space to the knot by the pond, and he came out of the fold one pace from the man inside it. The light on the grey Sword turned the colour of the setting sun. The Sunset-Splitting Sword opened a seam in the taker’s guard and then in the taker, and the man fell onto the frozen pond and didn’t move.

The knot by the north wall tore a rift behind itself to escape. Shi Feng saw the edges of the rift glowing red through the mist. He stepped through the void after it, came out at the other end of the rift before it closed, and cut down once. The second taker fell half in and half out of his own rift, and the rift closed and left him lying in the snow.

Two.

The faint glow behind the pond had moved. Shi Feng struck the fire to find it.

It was already behind him.

A palm came out of the mist and struck his left shoulder.

It didn’t hit hard, not at first. Then the cold went into him. It went through the skin and the muscle and into the bone itself, and the bone ached as if it were rotting from inside. His whole left arm went numb to the fingertips.

Ash-Bone Palm. And it was far too heavy.

Shi Feng spun and cut behind him, and the grey Sword didn’t hit anything but mist. The man in black had drawn his qi in so tightly that the fire could barely find him. Now he stood four paces away, faintly red at the edges, and for the first time Shi Feng could see his face. It was long and pale, with no expression on it at all.

A Deity Transformation cultivator couldn’t hit like that. Shi Feng had felt Shattering Void palms before. This was one.

“Deacon,” Shi Feng said, raising the grey Sword in his right hand. “You show the wrong realm.”

Gou Ran didn’t answer. He looked at the two dead takers, and at the last one by the south lamp, and at the moon gate where an early Profound Heaven guardian was standing perfectly still.

Then he tore a rift in the air with one hand and stepped into it.

It was a clean rift, and its edges weren’t rough at all. No Deity Transformation cultivator in the Empire could have torn it. It closed behind him, and the grey mist began to thin at once without him.

The last taker stood alone by the south lamp. He looked at the rift that had closed, and at Shi Feng coming toward him with the red light on the Sword. He put something in his mouth and bit down.

By the time Shi Feng reached him, he was lying on his back in the snow with black foam on his lips, and his eyes weren’t seeing anything any more.

The mist drained away over the walls. The four stone lamps stood dark at the corners of the court, and the snow was trampled red around the pond.

Qin Wuyan came out of the moon gate, with a dozen pale Hulan elders behind him. He looked at Shi Feng’s left shoulder for a long moment.

“His palm was heavier than his realm,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said, keeping his numb arm still. “He hid it until he struck.”

The west gate banged open, and Hulan Kui hurried in with twenty guards, every one of them holding a torch and a spear.

“Master Shi!” Hulan Kui said, breathing hard, his soft voice raised for once. “The outer gate held! Not one bandit got through it!”

Shi Feng looked at the three dead men in the snow, and then at the chief elder’s clean hands.

“I’m sure it held, Chief Elder,” Shi Feng said. “Nobody tried to come through it.”