Chapter 38 — The Abyss of the Dead
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 7 of 7
She gazed after him through the air, and in that single moment it was as if all the days gone by passed before her heart, scene by scene—
On Heaven-Reaching Peak of Mount Canglan, the youth who had blushed when he drew the lot and looked at her face;
In the midst of that duel, in the thunder and raging wind, the eyes that had suddenly softened;
And just now, the one who had coughed blood for her sake and charged in to save her, reckless of everything!
A great boulder came crashing down atop her. Lu Xueqi set her jaw and her face went cold; with the last of her strength she struck a hand against the stone, vaulted off its force, and changed her course—flying toward Zhang Qingyue.
Stones fell like rain, the water dragon raged—yet all of it seemed to lie at the far edge of the world. The Celestial Jade Sword gave off a faint blue glow and flew after its mistress.
Slipping past several flights of falling rock, Lu Xueqi caught up with Zhang Qingyue and seized his hand. She was about to pull him back—when she felt the last spark of strength in her body slip away from her.
"Is she coming to save me?" Zhang Qingyue glimpsed Lu Xueqi through his blurring vision and murmured the thought inwardly. Then it struck him that he and Lu Xueqi had already flown past the great boulder carved with the three vast characters "Abyss of the Dead", the stone blazing with fierce light, and were now suspended above the chasm itself.
And then they were falling.
Lu Xueqi seemed to have lost all sense of what was happening; she had closed her eyes, and her body was rolling to one side. Her pale face, seen now, seemed somehow to wear a trace of relief.
In that last instant before he plunged into the bottomless gulf beneath him, a gulf that seemed an eternal darkness, Zhang Qingyue lingered a moment still in the light, and faintly, indistinctly, heard a Buddha's invocation. Then golden radiance blazed forth.
The next moment, he was swallowed by the dark.
Boundless, measureless darkness, as though eternal; even the woman at his side, so close at hand, he could not make out by so much as a hair.
Yet in the final moment before consciousness left him, he still knew that Lu Xueqi's hand and his were still clasped together, very tightly, very tightly.
He even vaguely felt that her hand, at this moment, was so cold, so very cold.
The endless dark devoured all.
Here ends Part One of Slaying the Immortals.