Chapter 98 — The Giant Tree
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 3 of 6
Because of Biluo, the Underworld King had treated him almost as his own son, pouring out his heart in instruction; under his deliberate cultivation, the Ming Li of today was no longer the ignorant young disciple of Canglan of former days—not in his cultivation of the Dao, nor in his knowledge and experience.
As he now observed the giant trees of the forest, he saw that in truth they were not all rare and unheard-of species; among them were oaks, maples, locusts, and the like, which grew plentifully in any ordinary mountain outside the Dead Marsh. What was strange was that the trees here were all extraordinarily huge—ordinarily, one half their size would already be astonishing, let alone so many gathered together.
Stranger still, the places where these giants grew ought to have been brimming with life, yet beneath this dense fog not a single animal was to be seen, and even the brambles and brush that had occasionally appeared when he first entered were all gone. Even on the ground, apart from the giant roots that occasionally broke the surface, there was only hard, faintly yellow earth—not so much as a blade of grass.
Beneath the cold fog lay a killing stillness.
Ming Li frowned deeply and brooded for a long while, looking all around. The giant trees towered to the heavens, straight and high, and as he strolled among them he felt as though he had fallen into an enormous labyrinth.
Suddenly he flicked his sleeve, and his whole body rose into the air. Unwilling to linger in this eerie place, he summoned the Soul Devourer and flew forward amid a dark blue radiance.
His speed was naturally much greater now, but mindful that the wondrous treasure might lie close at hand, Ming Li did not fly above the treetops. Instead he kept merely six feet above the ground, flying swiftly while carefully searching the earth below.
Time slipped quietly by; the woods remained utterly still, and only the sound of his passage echoed among the trees. As Ming Li pressed deeper, the trunks grew larger and larger, until most of those that met his eyes were ancient trees so incredibly thick that six or seven sturdy men could not have encircled them. No need to guess—these trees must have lived for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years!
Amid an atmosphere grown ever more thickly strange, Ming Li's figure suddenly came to a halt.
By now it had been light for some time, yet the mist here showed no sign of dispersing at all, as though since the beginning of time these layered fogs had coexisted with this forest.
There, in the deepest part of the forest, Ming Li stood suspended in midair, gazing ahead.
Before him, sheer and towering, stood a wall!
A wall of wood!
Rough-grained wood, hard and faintly cracked, thrust suddenly out of the depths of the mist: a wooden wall three yards high, as strong and sinewy as a coiled dragon, barring the way through the giant trees, its base driven deep into the soil.
Ming Li watched coldly, motionless, studying this wooden wall in minute detail, the corners of his eyes beginning to twitch. Then slowly he shifted his body closer and lightly touched it with his hand.
At the touch came a mild, rough sensation, and something stirred faintly in Ming Li's mind—but he dared not believe it. He withdrew his hand and drifted slowly forward along the wall.
The white mist parted before him and slowly closed again behind him; the wall ahead grew taller and thicker, gradually taking on a rounded shape as its height crept upward.
At last, when it had reached nearly six yards, he came to the end of this wooden wall, and Ming Li's body halted.
He drew a deep breath, yet still could not calm his mind; amid an irrepressible pounding of his heart, everything before him, piercing through the mist, finally revealed itself.
This enormous wooden wall, at the end of the fog, blended harmoniously into something even more vast.