Chương 150: Chapter 149: Fire Endurance

Yang stepped outside his cubicle as the final preparation chime rang and the elder's voice came through.

"Disciples, move to your stations." He walked the few feet to the defending area with his completed talismans in hand. As he reached it the formation lines on the floor lit up brighter and so did the orb. It had come alive, its internal glow flaring and pulsing at irregular intensities. The disciple at the station to his right was nervously flipping through his talismans. Yang took a slow breath, faced the orb, and waited. The bell rang.

Before the sound had fully died he had the first talisman out and threw it toward the orb. It expanded on contact and sealed around the orb in a bubble roughly three feet in radius, a contained barrier that allowed nothing in and nothing out. The idea came from the earliest version of his shield card, the one he had spent years refining in the Cardwright World, before he had worked out how to allow passive atmospheric exchange. This version did not allow any air exchange at all. No outside air reaching the orb.

No oxygen to feed the fire. He had the second talisman already in his hand as the orb flared and the bubble shattered. The earth wall rose from the ground between him and the orb, solid and immediate. He felt the heat even behind it, the edge of the wall turning faintly red and then hardening as the fire struck. The wall held. Yang let out a breath. He had survived the first attack.

If he had known earlier that the earth wall would hold, he would have spent the entire preparation time making only earth walls, stacking them row after row between himself and the orb. Too late now. The second attack came more intense. He saw the cracks spread across the earth wall as fire and heat seeped through them. It held, but only barely. He wiped sweat from his forehead and stopped. He stared at his hand. He had not sweated in years.

Since eating the beast cores his constitution had become robust enough that heat and cold rarely registered as discomfort. He could not remember the last time he had felt warmth like this on his own skin. He had been colder climbing the mountain out of the village, but this was different. This was heat reaching him despite everything he had put in its way. He shook it off and pulled out the next talisman. The cracked earth wall would not survive another direct hit.

He activated a qi barrier talisman over it, hoping the combination would hold for one more round. The third attack came. The cracked earth wall shattered under it. The qi barrier reduced the force but could not stop all of it, and fire and heat reached Yang on his right side and across his hands where he had brought them up over his head instinctively. He felt the burns before he could process what had happened. He straightened up and immediately patted at his hair. Embers. He got them out.

His robes looked undamaged, the sect-issue fabric apparently built to withstand worse than this. The skin on his hands and the right side of his body was another matter. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. He pulled out the next three talismans and the moment the orb began to glow he threw all three together. A spray of water erupted across the lane, broad and heavy, hitting the fire head on. The entire lane filled with steam.

The steam reached him and he nearly cried out. The heat of it against already burned skin was its own particular sting. He held himself still and breathed through it as the fire died back. Five talismans left. He planted his feet, activated the ice shell talisman against himself, and watched the ice climb up around him until he was fully enclosed in a pointed shell. The ice thickened. He lost sight of the outside.

The next attack came as sensation rather than sight, the ice melting in streams around him, the temperature dropping where it persisted and rising where it burned away. The attack lasted longer this time. He activated his second ice shell without waiting, adding another layer over the first. The fire finally dissipated. He leaned back against the inner surface of the shell and felt it soothe his burns. One ice shell talisman remaining. The sixth attack arrived.

Yang watched through the now thinning barrier as the fire engulfed the outer shell. He activated his last ice shell talisman and felt the ice thicken again, but it was not enough. This attack was stronger than anything before it. Tiny holes appeared in the ice. Fire came through them, and Yang backed away and slipped on the wet stone floor as the whole shell cracked apart around him. He was burning again.

He barely had time to register the ceiling before something was pushed into his mouth and hands were on him, lifting and carrying. Inner sect disciples, two of them, moving quickly and efficiently down the steps off the platform and through a set of doors. The numbness that had followed the pill in his mouth spread out from his core and the burning sensation withdrew to a dull background hum. They put him on a bed. He turned to thank them but they were already walking back out.

An elder appeared at his bedside, checked his eyes, looked at his hands, and shoved a second pill at him. Yang swallowed it. A coolness spread through his body and he could think clearly again. The elder looked him over with the unhurried assessment of someone for whom this was ordinary work. Yang watched in mild fascination as the burned skin on his hands and arms began to peel away, new skin coming in pink beneath it.

"An hour should do it," the elder said. At Yang's questioning look: "Your burns are not severe. No appendages need regrowing. About half your skin needs replacing. Stay on this bed until released." He turned and moved to the next bed. Yang looked over. The disciple in the adjacent bed had skin oozing a yellowy fluid from what looked like most of his upper body. He noticed Yang looking and gave a wide toothy smile. Yang smiled back, though he suspected his face produced something closer to a grimace.

The other disciple looked considerably worse off, but evidently felt nothing, courtesy of the same painkiller. Yang looked down at his own hands, slowly going pink. He let out a small laugh. He had not done well. But it had been interesting. He could think of half a dozen approaches to fire attacks in open space. In an enclosed lane with formation boundaries on either side he had run out of useful ideas within the first three attacks.

The earth wall had been his best option given the constraints, and he had not made enough of them. The ice shells had bought him time but not enough. The water spray had worked once and produced steam that burned him almost as badly as the fire had. What the competition had shown him, plainly, was that he thought about combat in terms of known variables. Here was the attack, here was the defender, here were the tools available. But the actual cultivation world was not a list of known variables.

There was a mind behind every fire. There were environments he had never encountered, restrictions he had not anticipated, pressures he could not account for in preparation. When the variables changed mid-encounter, he ran out of answers. He had known this as a concept. Sitting in a sect cave making talismans and thinking about scenarios was not the same as standing in one and burning. He stared at the ceiling and thought about that for a while as the new skin grew in.