Chapter 159 — Loneliness
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 6
Low, guttural roars drifted in from every direction. Across the plains more than two hundred li from Canglan Mountain, more and more monstrous beasts of the southern wilds were gathering, and ever more of them raised their heads and howled at the sky. Mingled among the herds were six or seven creatures of especially enormous bulk, far outstripping the ordinary beasts around them—demon beasts standing amid the throngs, turning their heads and growling low, and the surrounding beasts seemed to hold them in particular dread.
The misty rain drifted down; the storm clouds in the sky grew thicker and thicker, and gradually, at the very rim of the horizon, faint flashes of light began to flicker within the cloudbanks. A moment later, the rumble of thunder finally rolled across the heavens.
Heaven and earth pressed dark and heavy, steeped in an indescribable sense of the ages' passage.
Lightning streaked across the sky, throwing into relief a lithe and powerful silhouette—the giant bird demon, just returned from the walls of He Yin City, descended from the heavens. By the lingering flash, the beasts below all saw that the great bird's talons gripped two men. In an instant, several hundred beasts near and far raised their voices in a furious roar, a display of force that set the hair on end.
Great wings beat and drifted through wind and rain. The bird circled above the herd a while, then suddenly its talons sprang open, and the two figures dropped like stones. Yet though the figures tumbled through the air, they did not flail in wild struggle—they were stiff and rigid, and one could well guess that somewhere along the way these two poor souls had already been crushed to death in those monstrous claws.
The roaring from the beasts on the ground surged instantly higher; the gnashing of teeth rose and fell on every side, and in an instant at least several dozen beast-shapes leaped and pounced. Through the bleak, mournful rain one glimpsed only a few flecks of blood, and then they too vanished.
The great bird wheeling in the sky gave two shrill cries, flew on a while longer, then—as if it had discovered something—folded its wings, dropped from the sky, and plunged toward the depths of the serried herds. Just as its vast bulk was about to strike the ground, its broad wings suddenly spread wide again with a "whoosh," and the powerful blast of wind bowled over the several beasts directly beneath it, sending them tumbling and bawling.
A fierce gust swept through, and the great bird went gliding on over the herds. All along its path countless beasts bowed their heads in awe and shrank aside; here and there it came upon those few demon beasts of equal might, and they seemed to glare at one another, neither giving ground. On it glided, its body rising and falling, now skimming over the tops of the beasts' heads, now vaulting past the crowns of trees, and at times, encountering some elephantine demon beast too monstrously vast to be believed, it simply slipped straight beneath the creature's belly.
Wind and rain lashed; thunder and lightning clashed at the horizon. The great bird's silhouette in the storm drifted like duckweed on a stream. At last it gave another shrill cry and dropped down from midair.
That was the deepest heart of the herd, amid the dense and massing ranks of uncanny beasts, where, in the flash of lightning from the sky, an oilcloth umbrella stood out starkly—its blue-green canopy painted with a few sprays of peach blossom, swaying gently in the wind and rain.