Chapter 136 — Soul Summoning
劍問蒼天 · Page 2 of 6
Holding the brush aloft, the shaman slowly made his way, with Mingli's support, to the cold ice stone platform where Bili lay. Starting at the place where the platform met the floor, he slowly traced the first stroke.
The vivid color crept steadily across the once-smooth floor. With a faintly trembling hand, the old man drew blood talisman after blood talisman. All around was dead silence, and yet the atmosphere somehow seemed to grow tense by degrees.
Hades watched for a while, then quietly walked over to the bronze basin, lifted it, took a few steps, and set it down beside the shaman. The shaman, in the midst of drawing, raised his head to glance at him, nodded silently, and bent once more to his work.
More and more strokes of blood spread around Bili, centering on her cold ice platform. A strange sorcerous array, reeking of blood, was beginning to take shape.
The shaman's red brush was clearly a rare artifact of the Southern Wastes' shamanic arts as well. The blood it absorbed, once drawn onto the ground by the shaman, strangely congealed without drying, its color fresh and vivid; and at every corner and turn, not a single thread of blood splattered beyond the lines—as though a prison had been drawn upon the earth to hold the blood fast within.
As the shaman's breathing came again, gradually growing heavier, the blood-red patterns on the floor grew more and more intricate. Some of these bizarre figures resembled livestock or savage beasts, some birds of flight, and others were strange shapes beyond any recognition at all, appearing one after another, no two ever alike.
Only one thing was common to them all: every pattern was linked to the next. More and more blood was drawn from the bronze basin onto the floor by the red brush, and yet the blood upon the ground seemed even more brilliantly colored than it had been when first carried in.
The smell of blood in the air grew ever more overpowering. Within the stone chamber, apart from the shaman's breathing, there was not a single alien sound.
These blood-drawn patterns and arrays spread outward from the floor at the left shoulder of Bili's platform. Stroke by stroke, the shaman applied himself with single-minded care. Mingli supported him and watched with his own eyes as that vivid flush of blood came into being from nothing, from little to much, gradually gathering into an oval ring five feet in radius. By now, apart from a small patch of floor near the head of Bili's platform, the ground around her had turned to a sea of blood.
Once again Hades lifted the bronze basin, set it on the floor above the platform, and then slowly stepped aside. The strange array was nearly complete.
Countless linked patterns, great and small, glimmered with a blood-red light. At first glance they resembled nothing so much as a delta of interwoven waterways, the fresh, lively blood coursing joyously as though through living veins.
Surging from one place to another, turning back at the farthest reaches, like a gentle tide, ceaseless and unending.
The interwoven crimson gradually merged across the floor beneath their feet. At some point—no one could say when—the shaman's hand seemed to have begun trembling too much to hold the red brush any longer.
Mingli, supporting the old man's body, felt all the more clearly the agony emanating from that aged frame. Even he could not understand what it was that kept such a body going even now.
By this moment, the heavy gasping had turned hoarse. The shaman's forehead was soaked—and yet there was no more sweat left to flow.
Slowly, slowly, he stretched out his hand. The red brush, steeped in blood, drew the final stroke, and the last completed pattern joined with the very first blood figure he had drawn.
"Thup!"
With a low sound, the red brush fell limply to the ground. The weight in the crook of Mingli's arm suddenly grew leaden, and the shaman's body went slack.