劍問蒼天 - 第128章 追蹤 - 翰墨軒

Tu Magu was clearly taken aback, scarcely able to believe it. He asked again in a low voice in the Miao tongue, and the young wizard nodded firmly.

Tu Magu gave a long sigh, turned, and said, "The Great Wizard wishes to see you. Follow this wizard up."

Ming Li and Xiao Bai were both startled. Xiao Bai frowned, wondering how the Great Wizard could possibly know they had arrived at the foot of the mountain; Ming Li, meanwhile, felt a surge of joy—if the Great Wizard was willing to see him, surely he would most likely also be willing to heal Bi Li.

They followed the young wizard through the crowd and up the mountain. The Miao all wore expressions of incomprehension and anger, but the Great Wizard's lingering authority was evidently still potent; not one person present stepped forward to bar their way. Not long after they had gone, however, some Miao began chattering to Tu Magu in a flood of words, and many others quickly chimed in—plainly the people did not wish to see the wicked outlanders enter the altar again.

Tu Magu barked a few stern rebukes, glancing toward the altar halfway up the mountain as he did so, and only then did the voices of the Miao gradually subside.

Ming Li and Xiao Bai followed the wizard leading the way onto the platform before the altar. Almost at the same moment, both noticed that at the front edge of the platform, the ground originally paved with huge slabs of rock had cracked into countless fine fissures radiating out in all directions from the spot where the Great Wizard had stood the night before; and at the very center, the rock had been shattered to powder.

The two exchanged a glance. Xiao Bai's expression betrayed no change, but Ming Li was shaken inwardly.

This region of the southern border lay in a remote frontier, and had never been deemed worthy of notice by the cultivation sects of the Central Plains. Not only did the orthodox schools look down on it; even among the demonic cult there was much contempt for it. Yet now, seeing it with his own eyes, Ming Li realized that the uncanny, unfathomable sorcery of the southern border was truly not to be underestimated.

"Hu hu lu lu..." The wizard ahead urged them on in an odd, obscure Miao dialect, and Ming Li and Xiao Bai turned and followed.

The altar was deep, its gloom like an endless tunnel that swallowed their figures whole.

Far to the south of Qili Tong, where the Miao of the southern border made their home, a range of towering, precipitous, rolling mountains was known to the southern border folk, who paled at its very name, as the Ten Thousand Great Wastelands.

Here the sun seemed never to shine; dark clouds coiled about the peaks and black winds howled. Now and then a bold hunter, in a year of famine, would venture into the mountains to hunt—and never come back.

And among the five tribes of the southern border, a warning handed down from their forebears since ages past had always been kept: never venture into that wicked mountain range, for there dwelt the Demon King whom all the peoples of the southern border dreaded, and the terrifying barbarian tribes that served him.

For countless years this common prohibition had been passed from generation to generation, enduring among the five tribes of the southern border. As time flowed on, the Ten Thousand Great Wastelands, shrouded in black clouds, only grew more mysterious.

And the sole passage into that terrifying, mysterious world still stood quietly at the foot of the mountain even now—within a dark, sinister cave from which strange shrieks issued from time to time, setting the teeth on edge and chilling the body. In the legends of the southern border, those were the furious roars of the mysterious and terrifying Demon King.

A witch-fiend clad all in black appeared suddenly beside the cave like a ghost. Though dawn had already broken, darkness seemed still to shroud his surroundings.