Chapter 185 — Mad Dog

Zhou Yixuan halted too, glanced about him, and saw a dead log lying toppled nearby. He hurried over, plumped himself down on it, and only then stretched in a great lazy stretch, as though easing a weight from the bottom of his heart. Then he shot Xiao Wan a white-eyed look and said, "Yes, she's the busy one, she's the merciful one—so she gave her own grandfather's rations away to others too, and now even your grandfather goes hungry."

Xiao Wan's face flushed; she came over and stood behind Zhou Yixuan, put out both hands, and gently pummeled his shoulders, saying, "Grandfather, we're still better off than those people. But look at them—if they don't get a bit of food, they truly won't have the strength to go on, and I fear they'll just die on the way."

The Wild Wolf Daoist looked left and right and said, "You two sit here a while. I'll go into the woods and see if I can catch some game, to stave off hunger for now."

Xiao Wan smiled at him and said, "Very well. Thank you, Daoist."

The Wild Wolf Daoist grinned wide, and Zhou Yixuan suddenly gave a humph and said with a cold laugh, "What are you grinning at?

And grinning is one thing, but why does this old man see your grin as so despicably lewd—could it be you've some base thought in your heart?"

The Wild Wolf Daoist started in fright and hastily wiped the grin from his face; then he looked at Xiao Wan, and seeing her look at him with a touch of apology, his eyes at once lit up, and of anger there was no trace left. It was as though Zhou Yixuan did not exist, as though he simply ignored him; to Xiao Wan he said, "Then wait for me till I come back." And with that he strode quickly into the woods.

Zhou Yixuan grumbled a few words in exasperation, and Xiao Wan, behind him, said with mild reproach, "Grandfather, that Wild Dog Daoist has been with us so long now—why do you still never give him a kind look? Besides, he's looked after us so much all along this road, and he's no bad man!"

Zhou Yixuan gave a humph and said, "And what do you know of bad men and good men? Him following us, it's only to..."

"Grandfather!" Xiao Wan cried, cutting him off. Zhou Yixuan muttered a few complaints, then said no more.

In the woods there came a swishing sound, then a flurry of flapping, and after a while the sound of quick footsteps; the Wild Wolf Daoist, his face glad, came running out of the trees with a wild bird in his hand. In the days since that great beast-demon calamity, all living things had been laid waste, and even in the hills and wilds these beasts and wild birds seemed fewer than before. Today the Wild Wolf Daoist had been lucky enough; he had actually caught a bird that had slipped the net!

He came running back to the spot in high spirits and called out loudly, "Look what I've caught—" Suddenly his voice broke off. On the open ground where they had been, there was no one at all. Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan were both gone.

"Pat." The wild bird dropped from the Wild Wolf Daoist's hand to the ground.

The night wind was cold, and the chill seemed in an instant to soak into the depths of his marrow. The Wild Wolf Daoist's body, he knew not why, began faintly to tremble. He walked forward step by step; on that dead log lying toppled on the ground there was even yet the mark where Zhou Yixuan had just sat down.

"They've gone, gone..." The Wild Wolf Daoist's mind was all confusion; over that dog's face of his the expressions shifted and changed, and it was a look of great terror and grief. At this moment the wild dog stood dumb as a wooden fowl, but after a moment his body

gave a shudder and his eyes kindled bright, for he saw behind the dead log several disordered footprints, and in the soft earth beside those prints—stark there—a huge footprint a full size larger than a man's, three-toed in front, surely not a human being's.

The Wild Wolf Daoist's face changed greatly; first great joy, then great alarm. And just then, from far off, there seemed to come a long howl, so dismal and shrill it was like a savage wolf baying at the moon. The Wild Wolf Daoist stepped back a pace in spite of himself, but a moment later the muscles of that dog's face twitched faintly, and suddenly with a great shout he hurled himself into the depths of the dense forest, toward the howling—and at the look of him, he was like nothing so much as a mad dog.

A dog gone mad!

Just as the Wild Wolf Daoist rushed into the dense forest, on the dark vault of heaven there suddenly blazed a white light, racing from the north, streaking across the sky, cleaving the void away, pausing not at all, flying straight toward the south like a shooting star. And on the earth below, after a while, while that white light still lingered in the sky, a dark figure appeared not far from the clearing of a moment ago; looked at closely, it was all in black, face covered, and it was panting a little. It stopped in the woods and said to itself:

"How has his cultivation advanced so? It's like seeing a ghost." As it rested, suddenly it seemed to sense something; it turned and glanced deep into the forest, where faint sounds of fighting came. The man in black hesitated a moment, then lifted his head again toward that white light in the sky, shook his head, and sighed. Then his body flickered, and light as a ghost he slipped into the very direction the Wild Wolf Daoist had rushed.

The Wild Wolf Daoist had his fang artifact in hand, his face tense; in but a moment's time a dark red patch showed at his shoulder—he seemed already to have been wounded. But before him stood no less than two beast demons of enormous bulk, tiger-headed and lion-bodied, a full man's height and more; beside them the Wild Wolf Daoist looked hardly able to withstand a single blow.

Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan were, startlingly, behind those two beast demons. Here in the dense forest these two beast demons seemed to have made a lair in this desolate place; within, branches and grasses were piled every which way, and a stench of blood and rankness struck the nose. But most horrible of all, the place was strewn everywhere with the bones of the dead, and besides Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan there were even seven or eight living people here—though most seemed unconscious, and those awake were nothing but skin and bone, frozen in terror.

Where these two beast demons had plundered so many people from, one could not tell; but from this one could well imagine how savage the beast-demon calamity had been!

Facing these two beast demons of enormous bulk, the Wild Wolf Daoist breathed hard, his mind fixed in guard. When he had rushed here a moment ago and seen that Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan were indeed here, before he could even shout he had already come under attack from the two beast demons. In the clash, these two beast demons proved far from ordinary, possessed of boundless strength, and they had slashed open the Wild Wolf Daoist's shoulder. Yet for all that, the Wild Wolf Daoist was, after all, a cultivator, unlike common folk; in his panic he had brought out his artifact and wounded one beast demon in turn, and now that beast demon's foreleg ran with blood—clearly it too was faring ill.

But these two beast demons looked savage in the extreme; at the sight of blood they did not shrink back, but fixed their eyes on the Wild Wolf Daoist all the more deadly, held in check for the moment only by fear of the artifact in his hand—a standoff, for now. And the Wild Wolf Daoist was secretly crying out in bitterness: in that clash just now he understood in his heart that against one such beast demon he might win a wretched victory, but against two together he was certain to die.

Yet he might have turned and fled—only, somehow, his gaze drifted, whether he would or no, to that pair of anxious, frightened eyes behind the beast demons, and he could not move his feet to save himself alone.

Are there some things, then, that truly cannot be escaped?