Chapter 926 — The Centre of the Mist

CHAPTER 926

The Centre of the Mist

Gou Ran opened his mouth, and grey mist poured out of it.

It came out of his sleeves and his collar as well, thick and cold, and in three breaths it covered the road, the wagons and the slope below the hanging snow. The Grave-Mist Shroud. At Black Pine Fort it had filled one guest court. Here it filled the whole saddle.

Shi Feng sent out his Spirit Sense, and the mist swallowed it a pace from his face.

“Elder Shi!” Lü Wancheng’s voice came from somewhere to the left. “Elder Shi, I can’t see my own hand!”

“Get under the wagons,” Shi Feng said. “Everyone. Stay there.”

The two takers who were left had gone quiet in the grey. So had Gou Ran.

At Black Pine Fort, Shi Feng had lit the Second Anvil Fire to make the mist glow thickest where the men were standing. He reached for the fire now, and the first beat lit the mist around him red for ten paces. Then the mist pressed in, and the light died a pace from his hand. Gou Ran had learned from the fort. The mist was thicker, and it ate the light.

A palm came out of the grey on his left.

He turned into it too late. The Ash-Bone Palm hit his left shoulder in the same place it had hit at the fort, and the old wound tore open. The bone-rot cold went into the joint at once. He felt his shoulder go numb and his left hand drop from the hilt.

He cut back one-handed. The grey Sword went through empty mist.

“The same shoulder,” Gou Ran said, somewhere ahead, and his voice moved as he spoke. “I’m sorry. It’s just the easiest one to find.”

Shi Feng stepped back and felt the snow under his boots. It was packed hard on the road and loose on the slope. Gou Ran and the takers had stood on this saddle long before the caravan came. They knew every step of it. In the mist, the men who knew the ground had the advantage.

Shi Feng thought it through. He could change the footing and make their movements easier to find.

He crouched and pressed his right palm flat to the road. The Thousand Forge Flame Art ran out of his hand and into the snow, not as a forge beat this time but as plain heat, all of it at once. The road under him went soft. Then the snow around it, and the slope below it. Water ran out of the packed snow in a spreading ring, and the ring kept spreading, thirty paces, fifty, until the whole middle of the saddle was knee-deep slush running downhill toward the gorge.

Somewhere in the mist a taker cursed and splashed.

“What’s he doing?” another voice shouted. “My feet! It’s moving!”

Riverless Step at Perfection walked on anything that flowed. Shi Feng stood up and stood on top of the slush. Everyone else on the saddle was sinking to the knees in it and fighting the current. He was the only man on the mountain with solid footing now.

Every step the others took pushed the slush aside, and he could feel the pushes through the water under his feet. Two of them were close together on the right. One was moving alone.

He didn’t go after any of them yet. He walked the edge of the mist instead.

The shroud had an edge. He found it on the slope, where the grey thinned to white, and walked along it on the running water, a quarter of the way around and then halfway. The Grave-Mist Shroud didn’t drift like weather. Its maker held it, and it spread from him the same distance in every direction. If the edge made a circle, then its maker had to stand at the centre, or the shroud would fall apart.

The circle was a hundred paces across, and its centre was twenty paces up the road from the lead wagon.

Shi Feng ran across the water to the lead wagon, put a foot on the wheel and went up onto its roof. Then he jumped from the roof as high as he could, straight up into the grey, with the grey Sword in his right hand.

At the top of the jump he turned the point down.

Shi Feng couldn’t see Gou Ran, but he knew where to aim. Falling Star Sword would strike the centre of the shroud. The whole art drew into the point of the sword, and he dropped through the mist toward the centre of the circle.

Gou Ran heard him coming. He looked up and threw an Ash-Bone Palm straight overhead, and his feet slid in the slush under him as he threw it. The palm went half a foot wide.

The sword didn’t.

Boom!

The Falling Star Sword went in at the collarbone and drove Gou Ran down into the running slush. The Heretic Deacon tried to tear a rift behind him, the way he had at the fort. The rift opened a finger’s width and closed. His hands fell into the water.

The Grave-Mist Shroud thinned around them. Then it blew away down the gorge all at once, and the white saddle came back, with eighty people under thirty wagons staring out.

The last two takers stood knee-deep in slush thirty paces away. They looked at their deacon in the water. Then they turned and ran, splashing up the slope, and disappeared over the black ridge.

Shi Feng didn’t chase them. He couldn’t. His sea of qi was empty, his left arm hung dead from the torn shoulder, and his legs were shaking under him. He sat down on the edge of the wagon roof.

The drivers crept out from under the wheels.

“He killed the bandit chief!”

“In the mist! He couldn’t even see!”

“He melted the mountain. I saw it. The whole road turned to water!”

“Survive a great calamity, and great fortune follows,” Lü Wancheng said, wiping his face with both hands. “Heaven protect the Pavilion.”

“…”

Above them, the avalanche was still hanging in the air. Qin Wuyan stood under it with his palm raised and his feet sunk in the road. He hadn’t moved once.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said, catching his breath. “They’re clear. Lower it away from the wagons.”

Qin Wuyan turned his palm slowly. The hanging mountain moved with it. It slid sideways off the road, away from the wagons, and he set it down in the gorge one slab at a time, so carefully that not one chunk of ice touched a wheel.

When the last of it was down, he lowered his hand and looked at Shi Feng on the wagon roof.

“This one held the mountain,” Qin Wuyan said. “You held the rest.”