Chapter 151 — Purgatory
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 5 of 6
The others behind him at once noticed Lin Jinghong's strange state and could not help growing tense. Xiao Yichen called his name twice in a low voice, but he made no response at all; his eyes were fixed, staring straight ahead. Lu Xueling went up next, and then Li Xun, Yan Fei, Xiao Yichen, Fa Cheng, and Fa Jing, one after another, rounded the bend and saw the sight within Viper Valley.
And then every one of them stood frozen.
This must be that legendary Asura hell of misery—so frightful a scene, revealed stark beneath a clear blue sky in broad day. Countless skeletons lay within and without the houses of Viper Valley: human bones, and bones of every kind of beast and monster. Some were whole, but more were shattered limbs and torn trunks, split apart beyond recognition, packed so densely across the ground that scarcely a patch of empty earth could be seen.
After barely steadying their hearts, Xiao Yichen and the others, faces pale, forced themselves to walk on.
The unbearable sights were everywhere, and the deeper into the valley they went, the more savage the scene became. No imagination was needed to see how ferocious the fighting here had been. The bones of countless people and the carcasses of monsters and beast demons were tangled together, and the earth beneath their feet had turned deep black—the color of earth soaked through with blood.
Entering the compound of houses, they saw in every room, within and without, and at every important passage and doorway the brutal remnants of fierce combat. In some places the bones were piled high, plainly because both sides had fought to the death over some narrow entrance, trampling their comrades' corpses as they struggled on without end.
In the courtyards the party began to see the carcasses of several enormous beasts, some taller even than the halls and houses. But these beasts, once so ferocious and unrivaled, now merely lay quietly in this hell-on-earth, waiting to rot.
The stench of rot and carrion in the air had reached a frightful pitch, yet the orthodox disciples found it easier to bear than before, for the carnage before their eyes had dulled them somewhat to the smell. Still, not one of them looked well; by any measure, their faces had come to resemble those of the dead.
They walked on deeper into the compound, and more bones appeared before them. By now no one could say how many Demonic Cult disciples and beast monsters had died in this valley. Almost as if by instinct they walked inward, inward, inward...
Every face was blank and wooden; every hand clutched its owner's magic artifact tight and would not relax its grip. Having crossed countless bones and seas of blood, they came at last before a spirit hall.
They could still tell it was a spirit hall because they saw a coffin in the room, and within and around this room seemed to have been the fiercest ground of all—to say the bones were piled like a mountain would not be an exaggeration. It was here too that the party found many corpses familiar to them from the Demonic Cult: Bai Duzi, the Old Vampire Fiend, the Ancestor Duanmu...
These fiends of the Demonic Cult, who had once commanded the winds and called down the rain, now lay here with eyes open in death, and many of their faces still wore looks of terror.
Anyone could imagine—but no one wished to imagine—what scene had met their eyes in the moment before they died.
As their search went deeper, Xiao Yichen and the older members of the party found yet more famed figures of the Demonic Cult: the three great disciples of the Poison God, many important personages of the Sect of Lost Souls. As for the Hall of the Underworld King, though disciples in its robes had died in great numbers, the corpses of its famous figures were very rarely found.