Chapter 925 — Five Graves

CHAPTER 925

Five Graves

The caravan reached the high saddle at noon, and the wolves had stopped singing.

Thirty wagons were strung out along the switchbacks in a single line, with the guards walking beside the wheels and the red-rag poles going up ahead of them into the white. On the left the saddle fell away into a gorge. On the right a slope of old snow rose three hundred paces to a black ridge, smooth and heavy, without a single track on it.

Shi Feng walked beside the lead wagon with Qin Wuyan. Lü Wancheng walked behind them, counting wagons under his breath.

“Twenty-nine, thirty,” Lü Wancheng said happily. “All thirty on the saddle, Elder Shi. Two more hours and it’s downhill all the way!”

Up on the black ridge, something knocked three times on stone.

The whole slope moved.

It didn’t slide from the top. It broke along a straight line halfway up, a line too straight for any snow to break along by itself, and the slope below that line came loose all at once. A wall of snow as wide as the saddle came down toward thirty wagons and eighty people, and the roar of it hit them before the snow did.

“Avalanche!” a driver screamed.

“We’re finished! Heaven has no eyes!”

Qin Wuyan took his hands out of his sleeves.

He didn’t jump, and he didn’t shout. He raised one palm toward the slope, and his pressure came out of him all at once, the full pressure of early Profound Heaven that he’d shown for one breath on the Hanli ridge. It hit the falling snow head on.

The avalanche stopped in the air.

A whole mountainside of snow hung above the road, forty paces up, shaking. Chunks of ice the size of wagons rattled against each other inside it. Snow sifted down from its underside onto the drivers’ hats. Not one of them breathed.

Qin Wuyan stood under it with his palm raised. His feet had sunk to the ankles in the packed road.

“This one cannot move,” Qin Wuyan said, without turning his head. “If this one moves, it falls.”

Shi Feng understood at once. The caravan belonged to the Pavilion, and so did the eighty people under the snow. Holding them up was the guardian’s duty. It also meant the strongest man on the saddle was nailed to one spot for as long as the snow hung there.

Shi Feng’s expression hardened. Whoever buried the array knew Qin Wuyan would protect the caravan first. The falling snow was meant to keep him out of the fight.

Out of the white haze at the edge of the hanging snow, five men in grey stepped onto the road.

“Bandits!” the guards shouted, and drew. “Bandits on the pass!”

The man at the front was the one from Black Pine Fort. Deacon Gou Ran. He showed the same Deity Transformation aura as before, and he smiled at Shi Feng across thirty paces of road.

“Elder Shi,” Gou Ran said pleasantly, and spread his empty hands. “Your shoulder healed fast. That’s good. We were told to bring you in whole.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He flicked two fingers, and the four takers behind him moved.

They didn’t attack. They ran wide in four directions, two along the road and two out onto the slope, and each of them pulled a long white stake out of his sleeve. The stakes were bone, as long as a forearm, carved with grooves. All four takers slammed them into the snow at the same moment, at four corners around Shi Feng, twenty paces apart.

“Five Graves Array,” Gou Ran said. “Lie down in it.”

Grey lines snapped tight between the four stakes. The air inside the square went heavy and dead.

Shi Feng tried Void-Crossing Step and felt nothing. The space under his foot wouldn’t fold. It was nailed down at four corners, and everything between the nails was pinned in place. He couldn’t fold it, and Riverless Step had nothing to walk on, because nothing inside the square flowed anymore.

The four takers lifted iron mallets and struck their stakes.

Boom!

The stakes went a hand deeper into the snow, and the square shrank. The grey lines pulled inward a pace on every side. The air pressed on Shi Feng’s ribs from four directions. Each blow drove the nails deeper and pulled the space tighter, and when the stakes went all the way in, the space inside would close on whatever was left in it.

Boom!

Another pace. The bound ribs under his robe began to creak.

“Elder Shi!” Lü Wancheng shouted from behind the wagon wheel. “The stakes are closing in! Break one! Quickly!”

Shi Feng ignored the shouting and studied the grey lines. Forcing the trapped space wouldn’t work. He needed the same opening he’d found on the lake.

Each line ran from one stake to the next. It was a strip of space held still at both ends, just like the frozen rifts on the Helian lake. The array had nailed down the inside of the square. It couldn’t nail down its own lines, because the lines were the nails’ work.

He turned and stepped into the nearest line.

Void-Crossing Step at Major Success found both ends of it at once: the stake beside him, and the stake at the far corner, twenty paces away. He folded one against the other and came out of the line beside the second stake, right in front of the taker holding it.

The man had his mallet raised for the next blow. He never brought it down. The grey Sword went in under his arm and out the other side.

The taker fell across his stake. The grey line between that corner and the next shuddered.

“He’s on the lines!” Gou Ran shouted. “Drive them! Drive them now!”

The other three swung. Shi Feng was already inside the next line. He came out at the third corner, on the slope, and the taker there turned too late. The Sunset-Splitting Sword opened his throat in one cut, and he dropped into the snow beside his bone stake.

Two corners were dead. The other two stakes jumped in the snow with nothing pulling against them, and the grey lines snapped loose and vanished. The heavy air lifted off Shi Feng’s ribs.

The Five Graves Array was broken.

On the road the guards were shouting and cheering. Under the hanging mountain, Qin Wuyan hadn’t moved an inch.

Gou Ran had stopped smiling.

He looked at the two dead takers in the snow. Then he looked at Shi Feng, and something in his aura changed. The Deity Transformation pressure he’d shown at Black Pine Fort fell away from him, and what was underneath it was heavier.

Mid Shattering Void.

“I was told not to damage your hands,” Gou Ran said quietly. “I’ll try to remember.”