Chapter 145 — Meeting
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 3 of 7
Ming Li started, a fog settling over his mind. In an instant a thousand thoughts came crowding in on him, jostling one another—a question he had never once considered, suddenly laid before him. Old hatreds, deep grievances, a ten-year vow, and a figure in white robes that clung to him—his whole life had been a drifting through storm and rain, and never once had he asked what final wish might lie buried in the depths of his heart.
It should be to save Bili, surely—if he could bring her back to life, he would die content! This thought he had turned over in his heart on countless nights across ten years, how many times he could not say. And yet that face like frost, in the end, he could never bring himself to cast aside; in some quiet corner of his heart, it drifted gently still...
For a moment he was lost to himself. The night wind sighed, and how long passed he did not know; when he started awake, the youth had vanished. Taotie, too, seemed to have just leapt into the sky, melting into the dark curtain of night, its low roaring carried faintly from afar.
Little Grey darted up onto his shoulder with two soft cheeps. Ming Li slowly lifted his head to the sky and murmured, "Little Grey... I still have to see her once more, don't I?"
Little Grey did not quite seem to understand, and cared even less. It lifted its monkey head to the sky as well, as though still searching for some trace of Taotie.
The dying embers of the fire turned slowly to a wisp of thin smoke and drifted gently away. Ming Li and Little Grey stood in silence amid the deep mountain woods—a long, long while. Only a faint murmur drifted on the night wind.
"...I still have to see her once..."
As time passed, this catastrophe only grew more savage. Monstrous beasts and alien tribes had already broken into the Central Plains, and the common folk suffered grievous slaughter. Most of the Orthodox disciples sent out to scout simply vanished; the few with somewhat deeper cultivation who returned came back wounded, and in their reports to their masters they spoke in the gravest terms of the horrors of the beasts.
The world was drowned in misery, and the Orthodox cultivators were at their wit's end. It was at just this moment that word went out: the Canglan Sect, the Brahma Sound Temple, and the Flaming Sunset Valley—the three great Orthodox sects—would convene an alliance at Canglan Mountain, and they invited all Orthodox cultivators under heaven to join together against this calamity. At once cultivators from every corner of the world began converging on Canglan Mountain. Within a few days, tens of thousands had gathered around it—a thing never seen before—and most of them were refugees from the Central Plains. In their eyes, these immortal-seeming cultivators of Canglan Mountain were their last hope.
The Canglan Sect, charged with receiving them, was run off its feet. More and more fellow cultivators and common folk poured into Qingyun, and soon the guest quarters on Receiving Heaven Peak could hold no more; the other branches were obliged to open their doors as well. Fortunately the Canglan Sect was, after all, a sect a thousand years old, deep-rooted and great in substance, and in the end it managed to take them all in. Only the Little Bamboo Peak branch, which had always been made up of female disciples—and whose Abbess Shuijing was of so peculiar a temper—did not open its doors, to the great disappointment of many young disciples of other sects who had long admired it from afar.
Be that as it may, though the great calamity was upon them, this was still an unprecedented gathering of the Orthodox path. The Canglan Sect, as host, saw its prestige rise higher than ever, and it seemed the world was quietly coming to look to Qingyun for leadership; Daoist Sage Daoyan, sect master of Canglan, now sat firmly in the position of the foremost man under heaven.