Chapter 922 — Through the Ice

CHAPTER 922

Through the Ice

Every frozen rift on the lake came down at once.

Ten Thousand Li Avalanche didn’t cut anything new. It took the walls Helian Zhan had already cut, more than thirty standing slabs of frozen void, and tipped them all inward toward one point on the ice. That point was Shi Feng.

His left arm was frozen to the elbow where the last wall brushed it. His fingers wouldn’t close. Only his right hand could still wield the grey Sword.

Riverless Step took him three slides to the left across the meltwater. The slabs turned and followed. They didn’t fall the way stone falls. They slid through the air along the lines Helian Zhan had cut, and wherever two of them met, the lake split under them with a noise that rolled across the whole valley.

“He’s boxed in!” a Helian junior shouted from the shore.

“Zhan’s got him! It’s over!”

“Zhan! Zhan! Zhan!”

Three villages chanted the heir’s name. Shi Feng heard them clearly, but kept his attention on Helian Zhan’s shoulder.

Shi Feng counted. He’d spent a day in the Hold’s ice cellar learning the Helian rhythm from Helian Ba’s axe, and Ten Thousand Li Avalanche used the same count. Score, score, split. The walls slid on the two light beats and struck together on the split, and Helian Zhan’s right shoulder dropped half a finger before every split.

Going around the walls and sinking them with Second Anvil Fire had cost too much qi. Thirty remained. Shi Feng couldn’t melt them with what he had left.

He needed to cross them instead.

A frozen rift was still a rift. Helian Zhan’s axe split space, and the cold held the split open. Every wall on the lake was a door frozen standing open, with two ends that didn’t move. Void-Crossing Step folded the space under his foot against the space ahead. Until today it had only folded open ground, because torn space shifted and a fold through it landed somewhere he couldn’t choose.

These rifts couldn’t shift. The cold had nailed both their ends in place.

The shoulder dropped. The nearest wall came at him on the split, and Shi Feng stepped into it.

The cold went through him all at once. For one breath he stood inside the frozen void in a grey place with no sound, and he could see both ends of the rift: the lake behind him, and the lake on the far side of Helian Zhan, where the wall’s other end stood. He folded the near end against the far end and put his foot down.

He came out of the back of the wall six paces behind the Helian heir. The slabs crashed together on the empty ice where he’d been standing.

Void-Crossing Step had reached Major Success. It no longer needed open ground. It could cross through anything that held still at both ends.

[Art: Void-Crossing Step, Major Success]

Helian Zhan felt him and turned, with the Glacier-Splitting Axe already rising. Score. Score.

Shi Feng didn’t let him reach the split. He jumped inside the arc of the rising axe, where the haft was nearer to him than the edge. At the top of the jump he turned the grey Sword point down and dropped. The Falling Star Sword drew the qi of the whole art into its point. It fell inside the swing, where the axe edge couldn’t turn back to meet it, and hit the haft just above Helian Zhan’s hands.

Bang!

The haft held. Helian Zhan’s guard didn’t. The force went down the haft into his arms, through his arms into his knees, and the ice under his boots cracked in a ring. His right knee hit the lake. The Glacier-Splitting Axe slid out of his hands and lay flat on the ice.

The grey Sword stopped a finger’s width from the side of his neck.

The chanting stopped. For a long moment there was no sound on the lake except the last walls sinking into the meltwater.

Then the shore exploded.

“Mid against late!”

“Through the ice, not round it! He walked straight through the ice!”

“Our heir is twelfth on the Tianxing! Twelfth!”

“Was. He was twelfth.”

“The waves behind push the waves in front,” an old fisherman said, and nobody answered him.

“…”

Shi Feng stepped back and lowered the sword. His left arm hung white and stiff at his side. Blood ran from a cut on his scalp into his left eye, and his sea of qi was down to a thread. Two of his ribs had cracked on the way through the wall. He could feel them every time he breathed.

Helian Zhan stayed on one knee. He looked at the axe on the ice for a while. Then he laughed deeply, blood on his teeth.

“You went inside my walls,” Helian Zhan said, and wiped his mouth with the back of his fist. “Nobody goes inside them. They freeze.”

“I nearly did,” Shi Feng said, lifting his white arm. “I couldn’t have stayed inside any longer.”

Helian Zhan laughed again and got up. He was a head taller than Shi Feng and twice as broad. He picked up the axe without looking at it and slung it across his back. Then he reached into his fur coat and took out a disc of black iron stamped with a glacier.

“Helian guest token,” Helian Zhan said, and pressed it into Shi Feng’s good hand. “Any Helian fire is yours to sit at.”

On the shore the Helian went quiet. A guest token wasn’t given to a man who’d won a duel. It was given to a man the clan meant to keep as a friend. At the front of the crowd, Helian Ba grinned from ear to ear.

“Thank you, Young Master Helian,” Shi Feng said, and closed his fingers on the iron. “You’ll want a rematch.”

“Not yet,” Helian Zhan said, and shook his big head. “You’re mid Shattering Void, and you’ve just put the twelfth on his knee. Come back when you’ve caught up with your own name. Then I’ll beat you properly.”

Helian Tieshan came down off the bank onto the ice with heavy steps. The clan master looked at his son, then at the guest, and grunted.

“A fall into the pit is a gain in the wit,” Helian Tieshan said loudly, for the villages to hear. “My son has fallen into one today. Good. Someone carry the guest. He’s bleeding on my lake.”

At the edge of the ice, Qin Wuyan took his hands out of his sleeves. He had stood in the same place for the whole duel and hadn’t moved once. Now he turned and walked back toward the Hold without a word.

Behind him, at the back of the crowd, a thin man in southern silk was walking back toward the Hold as well, much faster. It was the Situ clerk who had wanted the duel to be to the death.

Helian Ba pushed through the juniors and took Shi Feng’s good arm over his shoulder.

“How’s the arm?” Helian Ba asked.

“Cold,” Shi Feng said, leaning on him. “Does the Hold have a hot spring?”