Chapter 949 — Snow-Burial Claw

CHAPTER 949

Snow-Burial Claw

On the second morning, halfway up Frost Wind Valley, a Profound Heaven presence opened on the eastern ridge.

It didn’t creep out. It came all at once, from a point just below the ridgeline, and it sat there in the open, heavy and cold. The porters’ song stopped in the middle of a line. Two of the sledge dogs lay down flat in the snow and wouldn’t get up.

Shi Feng sent his Spirit Sense up the slope. It reached the presence and stopped dead. He couldn’t see past it at all. Whoever stood up there was at Profound Heaven, and wasn’t hiding it.

That was what he didn’t like. People at Profound Heaven didn’t need to announce themselves to kill a sledge train.

Qin Wuyan had already stopped walking. He looked up at the ridge for the space of three breaths.

“This one goes up,” Qin Wuyan said. “It is above your line.”

“It’s waiting for you,” Shi Feng said.

“Yes,” Qin Wuyan said. “If this one does not go, it may come down.”

He was right, and they both knew it. By the Pavilion’s order, anything at Profound Heaven was his. If he stayed with the sledges and the presence came down, the porters would die before anyone drew a sword.

Qin Wuyan lifted one hand, palm down, and a square seal of grey light formed under it, as wide as a door. The Still Mountain Seal. The air around the old man went heavy and quiet. Then he walked straight up the slope with the seal held in front of him, and his feet didn’t sink into the snow at all.

At the top he turned his head once.

“Stay low,” Qin Wuyan said.

He went over the ridge, and the moment he was gone, the snow beside the stream stood up.

Three men in white furs came out of it. They’d been lying under the drift for hours, so still that the snow had covered them, and they rose without a sound. The two at the sides were Shattering Void, and Shi Feng felt their pressure come up at once. The one in the middle showed Deity Transformation. He was a long-armed man with a narrow face, and he wore a glove of grey iron on his right hand, with five hooked claws.

“Bandits!” Old Tie roared. “Behind the sledges! Everyone down!”

Twenty porters threw themselves behind the sledges.

“Master Shi,” Que Han said politely. “I’m Que Han. The road is closed today. Will you come quietly?”

“No,” Shi Feng said. “Get off this road.”

“No,” Que Han said, smiling, and raised the claw.

Shi Feng didn’t wait for it. He used Void-Crossing Step at once, folding the space to his left to put the front sledge between himself and all three of them.

Halfway through the fold, something caught it.

Que Han had closed his hand in the air thirty paces away. Five grey lines of frost tore through the space between them and hooked into the edge of the fold itself. Then Que Han pulled, and Shi Feng came out of the fold in the wrong place, three paces in front of the claw, with his feet sliding in the snow.

“Snow-Burial Claw,” Que Han said. “It hooks space, Master Shi. Your step is made of space.”

Behind Shi Feng, the air split.

The hunter on the left had opened a rift at his back with the Hidden Door Cut, and the point of a hook-sword was already coming out of it. Shi Feng twisted. The grey Sword came up across his shoulder and knocked the point aside, and the hook on its back still opened his robe.

Shi Feng tested a backward fold up the stream, seeking the claw’s limit.

The claw caught it again. The five grey lines hooked into the fold, and Que Han dragged him out of it again. This time he came out with his back to the claw.

Que Han struck.

The iron claws went into his back at the right shoulder and raked down toward the left hip. Shi Feng felt them go through the robe, through the skin, and scrape along the bone of his shoulder blade. Then the cold came in.

It wasn’t ordinary cold. The Snow-Burial Claw carried frost qi in every hook, and the frost went into the wound and started freezing the blood in his back. He felt it spread inside him, toward his spine and his lungs. In ten breaths he wouldn’t be able to move his arms.

He fell to one knee in the snow.

Behind the third sledge, one of the porters screamed.

“His back! They’ve opened his back!”

“Get down, you fool! Get down!”

Shi Feng didn’t try to push the cold out. There was too much of it, and he didn’t have time.

He took it in instead.

The All-Devouring Physique opened at the edges of the wound. The frost qi that was freezing his blood went into his body and through it, into his meridians, where his own qi broke it down. It was harsh and bitter, and it burned on the way down, but it was qi. His blood started moving again. His arms came back.

Que Han frowned in disbelief. The frost should have immobilised Shi Feng, yet he was getting up.

Gou Ran had done the same thing, Shi Feng thought. He’d shown Deity Transformation and fought like Shattering Void. The Snow-Burial Claw couldn’t hook space unless the man behind it had mastered space. Que Han was hiding his true realm, like every deacon who answered to Ning Zhe.

The claws hadn’t gone for his throat. They’d gone for his back. That fitted the bounty slip in Gou Ran’s ring. Alive.

“You’re bleeding a great deal, Master Shi,” Que Han said. “The order says alive. It doesn’t say whole.”

On either side of Shi Feng, the two hunters opened their rifts again and waited.