Chapter 142 — Calamity
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 6
Canglan Mountain.
Jietian Peak, the Ancestral Hall.
The old man who tended the hall still held his worn-out broom in his hand, standing at the great doorway of the Ancestral Hall and gazing outward. A strange expression flickered faintly across his deeply lined face—something like expectation, or perhaps a touch of excitement.
The open ground beyond the hall was utterly empty, yet a closer look would reveal many odd talismans around its edges that had not been there before, some pasted on the surrounding tree trunks, others hidden among the grass and stones. Each paper talisman stood about half a zhang from the next; they seemed unconnected, yet in truth they faintly formed a mysterious formation that sealed off this patch of ground from all that lay around it.
The sunlight was gentle, pouring down from the sky, and from within the formation or without, no difference could be seen at all—both were bathed alike in the sun's radiance.
Only in the next instant, a sharp ringing sound suddenly rose above that open ground. The old man standing at the hall's doorway lifted his head to look, and his hand tightened instinctively around the broom.
A peculiar darkness suddenly appeared above the open ground, in the blink of an eye shrouding the air overhead and dyeing everything around with a heavy sense of lethal menace. Yet this darkness stayed confined to that patch of ground alone—more precisely, to the formation formed by those talismans. Clearly this strange outer formation had been set by a master to bind this power within.
The black qi in midair only grew thicker, as though one stood in the ninth hell itself—but in the very next moment, a long dragon's roar suddenly burst from the black qi. Then green light blazed forth, bursting suddenly from the darkness; in an instant its radiance filled the sky and scattered the black qi to nothing.
Lin Jinghong appeared high in the air, the Dragon-Slaying Divine Sword in his hand, green light streaming from his body in dazzling brilliance. His eyes shone with a piercing light, man and sword as one, and he came plunging down from the heavens.
The Dragon-Slaying Sword trailed ten thousand beams of rosy radiance, releasing a mighty roar, its momentum vast beyond measure. While it was still high in the air, dust already whirled aloft from the ground below, sand and stones flying up. And as Lin Jinghong shot down like lightning, the air around him seemed to burst into flame from sheer speed and force.
He looked like a god of war, reckless of all else and burning with the will to fight, swooping down to strike.
The old man at the hall's doorway felt his lips begin to tremble slightly.
"Boom!"
The tremendous roar came in an instant; the ground struck by the power of this wondrous true art gave a groan of agony, and in that same moment the earth within the formation split apart, great and small stones tearing free of the ground and hurtling skyward. That force struck dead center upon the dazzling mass of green light, and had already driven deep into the earth.
The talismans all around the open ground, together with the mysterious charms drawn upon them, suddenly blazed bright as one. A faint sound of mystic incantation rose in the air, like a low murmuring chant, and an invisible force spread outward, enveloping this vast destructive power and keeping it from leaking beyond.
Outside the formation, the sun was warm, the grass and trees serene; within the formation, all was upheaval, like a raging storm.
Such was the wondrous spectacle outside the Ancestral Hall of Canglan Mountain at that moment.
In the distance, a figure in dark green stood gazing at the scene from afar, hands clasped behind his back, utterly motionless.
The storm within the formation gradually subsided; the sand and dust and stones flung skyward by the immense force came drifting back down, yet the cracks in the earth and that great deep pit still bore witness to the heaven-shaking blow of moments before.