Chapter 107 — The Demon Formation
劍問蒼天 · Page 2 of 6
You Si stepped forward and stood upon the platform. Suddenly all before her was bright: with no stone path to block her view, everything at the bottom of the cavern lay bare.
Beneath the cavern was, astonishingly, a great pool of blood; fresh crimson blood filled the bottom of the vast cavern, and how the Nether King Sect had come by so much fresh blood was beyond guessing. The thick smell of blood in the air must surely rise from below.
Steeped in the blood pool were two gigantic beasts: one was the Yellow Bird of the Death Marsh, the other the Kui Ox, the marvelous beast of Liubo Mountain in the Eastern Sea. Most of the bodies of these two ancient beasts were soaked in the bloody water, and at the same time a dark red beam of light shone down upon each from above the pool. The source of that dark red radiance was the Coiling Dragon Cauldron, hanging alone in midair, suspended there by some nameless force.
The Coiling Dragon Cauldron was positioned quite far from where the Nether King and You Si stood, but You Si could still make out a black silhouette upon it working a spell, though it was blurred by the red glow. Even so, she knew who it was: Mr. Ghost, the most mysterious figure in the Demonic Sect's Nether King Sect.
You Si was one of the previous generation's Four Holy Envoys of the Nether King Sect, and knew nearly every matter of the sect, great and small; only this Mr. Ghost was the exception. The reason was simple: this man had not originally been of the Nether King Sect. He was a mysterious figure who had appeared suddenly at the side of the present Nether King after his accession. The Nether King held him in the highest respect, and on the rare few occasions when this mysterious man had acted, the uncanny arts he displayed had moved even Azure Dragon, You Si, and other masters of the Nether King Sect.
Yet in You Si's heart there remained a deep wariness of the man, chiefly because it was under Mr. Ghost's vigorous urging that the Nether King had finally, ten years ago, begun to set in motion the "Four Spirits Blood Formation."
The Coiling Dragon Cauldron, the Sect's treasured heirloom passed down through the Nether King Sect's generations, was of unfathomable origin, containing endless spiritual power, neither righteous nor evil, uncanny in the extreme. Upon its body, besides the ancient and artless patterns, were carved many mysterious inscriptions that every past Sect Master had failed to decipher. But in this present generation, the Nether King, whose mind embraced all things and who was truly a rare genius of his age, happened also to have at his side a Mr. Ghost who seemed to have made a special study of these mysterious writings; and the two working together had, astonishingly, deciphered them.
It turned out that the inscriptions on the Coiling Dragon Cauldron recorded a strange formation called the "Four Spirits Blood Formation," which required the spiritual power of four marvelous beasts from the primal ages of antiquity to draw out the Cauldron's own uncanny magic, forming thereby a peerless and matchless formation. According to the ancient cauldron's inscriptions, once the Four Spirits Blood Formation was complete, its power would be enough to destroy heaven and earth.
The Nether King was a bold and ambitious colossus of his age; naturally he would not overlook such power. And in the great battle at Qingyun ten years before, the Canglan Sect's Immortal-Slaying Sword Formation had shaken the world and swept all before it, beyond the power of any mortal to withstand. The Nether King had pondered deeply, and concluded that only this Four Spirits Blood Formation might hold the chance of defeating the Immortal-Slaying Sword Formation.
From that time on, all the Nether King Sect's actions had begun to revolve around the Four Spirits Blood Formation.