Chapter 994 — Thunder Body

CHAPTER 994

Thunder Body

By sunrise there were more people around Black Mirror Lake than lived in Shuoyang.

They had come in the night from the villages, the salt towns and the northern forts. They stood twenty deep along the shore and sat on the roofs of the fishermen’s huts. Boys had climbed the willows. The Yelü had taken the low hill on the west shore, with Yelü Hong in grey fur at the front, walking without a stick for the first time in eight years. The Linghu stood together on the east shore in white mourning. Linghu Que was among them, at the back.

“Eighth on the Tianxing against tenth!”

“Eighth is a prince! Peak Shattering Void at eighteen!”

“The guest’s only late Shattering Void. That’s a whole stage.”

“A whole stage, against a genius? How’s he going to beat the prince?”

Qin Wuyan stood on the south shore. Lei Wanjun stood on the north. Neither of them moved, but their pressure went out across the lake from both sides and met in the middle, and the ring rose. It couldn’t be seen. It could be felt. The snow blowing in off the mountains reached the line and stopped dead, and the ice inside it lay black and bare for three hundred paces.

Yan Lianbi stood at the edge with the terms and read them aloud in a clear, flat voice. A spar, requested by His Highness the Fifth Prince. Two guardians. No blame on either side for any injury.

“Enough reading!” Long Zhenlei shouted from the far side of the ring. “Brother Steward, you’ve read it three times!”

“Twice, Your Highness,” Yan Lianbi said, and rolled up the terms.

Shi Feng walked out onto the ice. The prince walked out from the other side. They stopped a hundred paces apart in the middle of the ring.

Long Zhenlei rolled his shoulders and grinned.

“Abyss Thunder Body,” Long Zhenlei said.

The thunder came out of his skin.

It came all at once, from every pore, crawling over his arms and his neck and his face in a net of violet light. His skin darkened to the colour of a storm cloud. The ice under his feet cracked in a star, and the crack glowed for a moment with blue fire before it went dark. His aura rose to peak Shattering Void and kept rising, and the people in the front rows took three steps back without meaning to.

“His whole body!”

“That’s the Valley’s body art! It turns flesh into thunder!”

Long Zhenlei came across the ice.

He crossed the hundred paces in three steps. Each step burned a black footprint into the lake, and each footprint glowed and sank, and the thunder in it went down into the ice. Then his first fist was in front of Shi Feng’s face.

Shi Feng was already moving. The wind had blown a thin stream of loose frost across the bare ice, and Riverless Step walked on the stream. He slid left along it, and the fist went past his ear with a crack that made his teeth ache.

He cut back as he slid. The grey Sword went red with the Sunset-Splitting Sword and struck the prince’s forearm.

It didn’t cut.

Sparks sprayed off the prince’s skin in a shower of blue and red. The edge skidded along his arm and slid off at the elbow. Long Zhenlei didn’t even look at the arm.

“His skin turned the sword!”

“A Perfection sword art, and it didn’t even leave a mark!”

The second fist came. Then the third. Shi Feng slid off both on the frost streams, but each one came closer, and each one drove him back. Twenty paces. Forty. The prince didn’t stop to breathe. He came after him in straight lines, stamping, and every stamp burned another black footprint into the ice.

Shi Feng gave ground deliberately. Every fist he slid off told him a little more. The prince always stepped with his right foot. He always threw from the hip. His thunder came out of his knuckles a moment before his fist arrived, and Shi Feng read the light and moved on it.

By sixty paces, Shi Feng could read the flashes fast enough to dodge cleanly. He’d chosen to retreat while learning the timing. Now he could use it.

Long Zhenlei saw it, and laughed out loud.

“You’re reading my light!” Long Zhenlei shouted happily. “Good! Then don’t read this one!”

He stopped. He planted both feet in the ice and drew his right fist back to his hip.

The sky over the lake went dark. A roll of thunder came down out of a clear morning, and every hair on Shi Feng’s arms stood up. The violet light on the prince’s skin poured down his body and gathered in that one fist until it was too bright to look at.

“Sky-Rending Thunder Fist,” Long Zhenlei said.

There was no light first this time. The fist simply arrived.

Shi Feng never saw it leave the prince’s hip. Riverless Step read nothing, because there was nothing to read. He had time only to put the grey Sword flat across his chest and his left forearm behind it.

The fist hit the flat of the blade.

Boom!

The ice split under him. The crack ran out from his feet in a straight black line, fifty paces long, all the way to the edge of the ring, and the water came up through it in a white spray. The force went through the sword and through his forearm and into his chest, and he flew backward across the lake with his heels carving two grooves in the ice.

He stopped twenty paces from the ring line, on one knee.

His left arm was burning. The thunder had gone in through the bone and into the meridians, and he could feel it running up them, hot and black, eating its way toward his shoulder. He looked down. The skin of his forearm had turned black from the wrist to the elbow.

The shore was silent for one breath. Then it exploded.

“He blocked it! He blocked the Sky-Rending Fist!”

“Blocked it? Look at his arm! It’s burned black!”

“The Valley’s elders can’t take that fist with both hands!”

“…”

On the north shore, Lei Wanjun’s scorched beard twitched.

Shi Feng stood up slowly. He shook his left hand. The fingers moved, but only just, and the burn sat heavy and hot in the meridians.

Long Zhenlei was staring at him across the ice. His eyes were shining.

“You took it,” Long Zhenlei said. “Nobody my age has ever taken it. Not once. Yuejian didn’t take it. She dodged it.”

“I blocked it,” Shi Feng said, wiping blood from his mouth. “But the thunder got into my arm. I’d rather avoid the next one.”

Long Zhenlei threw back his head and laughed, and the thunder on his skin rose with it.

“Then I’ll be more careful with the rest of you!” Long Zhenlei shouted.

He raised both hands over his head, palms open.

All around Shi Feng, in a ring on the black ice, nine pillars of violet light began to rise.