Chapter 963 — Frost Lotus Burial
CHAPTER 963
Frost Lotus Burial
A thousand petals opened at once.
They came off Bai Ruoshuang’s raised sword in a white storm and spread out over the whole terrace, filling the air from the rail to the rail. Each one froze the space it hung in. Then they began to close, all of them together, curling inward toward the one man standing in the middle of the floor.
It was a lotus, and he was in the heart of it.
On the paths above, people screamed and pulled back from the edge.
“Frost Lotus Burial! She’s using the killing form!”
“In an exchange of pointers? That’s for killing!”
“Elder Jing, call it! Call it!”
On the top step Elder Jing Lanting didn’t call anything.
Her pressure came down instead.
It wasn’t much. Just a little early Profound Heaven pressure, leaking off the top step and onto the terrace. It was meant to look like an accident. It settled over the floor and pressed down on the space under the petals, and wherever it pressed, the frozen space grew harder. The lotus closed a little faster.
Nobody below Profound Heaven on the terrace could have done anything about it.
Qin Wuyan stood up.
He didn’t hurry. He took his hands out of his sleeves, and put one palm flat in front of him, facing the top step, and said the name of his art in four words.
“Still Mountain Seal. Hold,” Qin Wuyan said firmly.
His pressure met Elder Jing Lanting’s above the petals. Both pressures stopped. Under them, the space returned to the frost Bai Ruoshuang’s sword alone had made.
The field was level again.
“Senior Qin,” Elder Jing Lanting said, very coldly. “You’re standing.”
“Someone other than the girl lifted a hand,” Qin Wuyan said. “This one stands. The fight stays theirs.”
The terraces had gone silent.
Inside the closing lotus, Shi Feng felt the pressure lift, and stopped thinking about the top step at all.
He couldn’t fold through the petals. He couldn’t fold around them. There were too many to cut one at a time, and the Snowfold Screen couldn’t catch a thousand. In ten breaths they would close on him from every side.
Shi Feng forced himself to watch the movement of the frost qi. His alchemy experience might let him find the sword art’s weakness.
A real frost lotus had a thousand petals too. Melting them separately wasted time and qi. But every petal drew cold from the same stem. Once an alchemist cut that connection, the flower fell apart in the cauldron. He needed to find what supplied these petals.
Bai Ruoshuang’s lotus closed in a slow spiral. All of it turned around one point, and that point was the line of qi between the petals and her sword. She was standing at the edge of the white storm with both hands on the hilt, feeding it.
There. A thin line of cold running from the heart of the flower back to her blade.
That was the stem.
His left arm was frozen and useless. He changed the grey Sword to his right hand and let the Sunset-Splitting Sword come up through him.
He had it at Perfection. It didn’t need to fold anything. It only needed to cut.
He cut once.
The stroke went out low and level, red-gold through the white, and it didn’t touch a single petal. It went between them. It found the line of cold that held the lotus to her sword, and cut it.
The lotus stopped.
For one breath a thousand petals hung in the air, not moving. Then they fell apart. They came down over the Lotus Terrace as plain snow, soft and harmless, onto the white stone, onto the rail, onto the heads of the people on the paths.
Shi Feng was already moving through it.
He came out of the falling snow at her left side, and the grey Sword’s edge stopped at her throat. Her own blade had come round to meet him. Its point stopped a finger short of his ribs.
Neither of them moved.
The snow kept falling between them.
Bai Ruoshuang looked at his sword, then at her own point a finger short of his side. Her face went pale. His stroke would have reached her first. She’d promised to measure him honestly, and the result was clear.
“I lost,” Bai Ruoshuang said.
She stepped back, lowered her sword, and bowed to him properly, the full bow of a junior to a senior, in front of the whole sect.
Shi Feng returned it with his one good arm.
Then the noise came.
“She lost! Senior Sister Bai lost!”
“Twelfth beat tenth! On our own terrace!”
“He cut the stem. He didn’t touch a single petal. He just cut the stem!”
“He was mid Shattering Void a week ago! A week!”
“…”
“A good sword on both sides,” an old outer elder said loudly from the roof of the Hearing Hall. “Heroes come from the young.”
Up on the top step, Elder Jing Lanting rose. Her pressure was gone. Her face was calm and very pale.
“Senior Qin,” Elder Jing Lanting said. “Thank you for keeping the terrace in order.”
“This one keeps it,” Qin Wuyan said, and put his hands back in his sleeves.
Elder Jing turned and walked off the step without looking at her disciple.
At the end of the elders’ row, the Tianji scribe was writing very quickly. He didn’t look up. He filled one page, turned it and filled another.
Shi Feng stood in the middle of the Lotus Terrace with the snow settling on his shoulders. His chest was bleeding again through the frost. His left arm hung at his side, frozen hard and white to the shoulder, and he couldn’t feel his fingers at all.
He looked up at the steps, at the elders and the disciples and four thousand silent faces.
“Could somebody thaw my arm?” Shi Feng asked. “I’d like to use it again.”