Chapter 37 — Strange Eyes
劍問蒼天 · Page 1 of 6
Far behind them, the roar and clash of battle never ceased; lights flickered, and it was plain that the three from the Canglan Sect were locked in fierce combat with the other fiends in the darkness. Yet here, around Zhang Qingyue, all had suddenly fallen into an eerie quiet.
Zhang Qingyue stood dazed and lost in thought — but the masters of the yellow flying sword and the grey fangs had seen that grotesque spectacle with their own eyes, and they were too shocked to know what to do.
"Wild Dog, tell me I'm not seeing things. Jiang the Third was sucking men's blood — so how does it look like he's the one who got drained dry?"
Another voice, rough and gruff, came out of the dark: "Hell if I know. The Canglan Sect actually has someone who can practice the Bloodsucking **? Is this fellow a disciple of our own Immortal Sect or what?"
The first speaker spat. After a moment, though, he could find nothing to say, and snapped irritably, "No. This one's origin is too strange. We've got to get to the bottom of it!"
Two globes of light flared before Zhang Qingyue, gradually resolving into two figures. Zhang Qingyue came back to himself with a start, hastily cast aside his stray thoughts, and focused his mind on the enemy.
In the light, the yellow flying sword and the grey fangs flew back to their respective masters. The one on the left caught the sword — a tall, gaunt man with a thin face, a hooked nose, and small eyes in which black and white stood sharply apart, glinting with malice. The one beside him was stranger still. At first glance Zhang Qingyue was startled: the man was tall as well, but his appearance was bizarre — drooping eyelids, a jutting nose, ears that pointed upward, lips a vivid red, and a tongue that seemed remarkably long, darting out from time to time, so that he looked very much like a dog. The grey fang flew back into that man's hand, and Zhang Qingyue's first thought was instinctive: could this be the tooth of some great hound?
The man called Wild Dog saw that once Zhang Qingyue laid eyes on him he could not look away, and that his gaze was full of astonishment. Furious, he barked, "Hey! You little whelp, what are you staring at your Daoist Wild Dog for?"
"Daoist Wild Dog?" Zhang Qingyue frowned, and only then noticed that this dog-faced man was in fact wearing a pitch-black Daoist robe. So he belonged to the same faith as the Canglan Sect, it seemed — though who knew whether, traced back three thousand years, there might be some shared ancestry.
The man, who called himself the Wild Wolf Daoist, saw Zhang Qingyue's open contempt and grew angrier still. "Whelp, I'm asking you how you killed the vampire!"
Zhang Qingyue blinked. "What vampire?"
The tall man beside him snapped, "The one on your back, that's who!"
Only then did Zhang Qingyue remember that he was still carrying the corpse. A cold, clammy sensation crept across the back of his neck. With a cry of alarm he sprang away and flung the body off. It hit the ground with a dull thud — the thing that had been a man was now no more than skin stretched over a skeleton. One look was enough to turn Zhang Qingyue's stomach; he twisted his face away.
The Wild Wolf Daoist and the tall man glanced at the skeleton, then at each other, and each read the same shock and suspicion in the other's eyes. The Bloodsucking ** was cruel and uncanny; formidable though it was, it did terrible damage to the practitioner's own body, and those who trained in it ceased to be quite human and were not quite ghosts either. Though these two were of the Devil Sect, they had always kept their distance from such arts — yet they knew a thing or two about this mysterious discipline.