Chapter 131 — Parting
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 4 of 6
The old man's body began to tremble faintly. Suddenly he turned sharply back, and once more gazed upon this land, this valley, this sky...
The Miao in the distance cried out in alarm, and many leapt up from the ground in joyful surprise.
Yet in the next instant the Great Shaman shut his eyes tightly, as though to carve everything in this land into his heart; his brows knit, and once again he turned his body away.
A sudden stillness fell over the valley.
Countless gazes seemed to cry out soundlessly behind him!
The muscles of the Great Shaman's face twitched slightly; slowly, slowly, he set his feet forward and vanished into that passage.
Within Qili Tong, all was silent.
A long while later, no one knew who first began to weep aloud; in a moment the whole valley was filled with the sound of mourning.
The Ten Thousand Wild Mountains.
Beyond the Black Forest, across seven perilous mountain ranges, stands a high mountain ringed year-round in black mist, where a sinister wind howls. And beneath this bare mountain, without a single tree or blade of grass, there was in fact a great cave. Its mouth stood thirty zhang high and fifteen wide, and ceaselessly, year in and year out, a cold wind rushed shrieking from it, mingled with shrill uncanny sounds, as though the soul of some raging fury howled on without end.
Dead center at the cave's mouth stood a stone statue, the size of a living person, plainly the figure of a beautiful woman, facing deep into the Demon-Quelling Cave, standing silently. The cold wind that howled year-round blew without pause upon the statue, giving out a low sound, like a frail plank of wood sheltering from the storm in a tempest.
Yet she seemed never to retreat!
The witch-fiend, all in black, now stood before this statue, gazing at it in silence.
The evil dragon at his side seemed especially in awe of the statue; instinctively it drew away, looked about this way and that for a while, gave a cry, stretched out its four legs, and ran up the high mountain. Soon it vanished into the black mist.
The icy, piercing wind stirred the witch-fiend's black garments, and amid this desolate scene the man seemed to grow gradually unreal, cloaked in a trace of insubstantiality.
So he stood gazing, on and on, so long that even Jin Pingyue began to wonder whether this man in black had not turned into a stone statue himself.
Her narrow escape from the Black Forest, and the chance discovery beneath that great cliff of a Life-Taking Blade thrust deep into a crack in the rock, led Jin Pingyue to guess dimly: could the Life-Taking Monk, great general of the Underworld Cult, have entered this place even before she had?
Yet the Life-Taking Blade was there, and the Life-Taking Monk was nowhere to be seen. The man gone, the weapon left behind—the danger this implied was easy to imagine, and most likely the Life-Taking Monk had met with disaster. Truly, in the Ten Thousand Wild Mountains every step was a deathtrap.
Yet after pondering, Jin Pingyue still followed the witch-fiend's tracks in secret. Along the way she learned that the witch-fiend possessed strange arts, and she grew all the more cautious, not daring the slightest negligence, still less daring to approach that black-robed monster and that evil dragon. And since the witch-fiend most likely believed the tracker behind him had died in the Black Forest, he never noticed Jin Pingyue, and so let her follow all the way to the ancient Demon-Quelling Cave.
At this moment Jin Pingyue lay behind a small mound in the distance, watching that black figure from afar, and could not help wondering whether this man in black meant to stand before the woman's statue for a lifetime.
From the time he reached the Demon-Quelling Cave until now, the witch-fiend had stood motionless, gazing at the statue, for more than four hours.