劍問蒼天 - 第168章 巫術 - 翰墨軒

Beyond the ancient forbidden ground, birds sang and the mountain lay in quietude; apart from the faint roar of struggle drifting from before the distant peaks, there was no other clamor. A slow mountain wind blew gently from afar, and the whole hillside of green swayed together, as though this were no scene of the mortal world.

Beneath those four vigorous characters—Phantom Moon Grotto Heaven—the weathered stone wall around the cave mouth had flaked away in many places, as if recording the endless years that had quietly flowed past here. And now this stretch of mountain wildness seemed to hold its silence too, watching two men face each other without a word.

So many years had slipped by, it seemed, all unnoticed; and when one turned to look back, how many of one's old friends remained?

Lin Jinghong had been silent all along, yet the expression on his face shifted violently from moment to moment; only his eyes never once left the figure of Ming Li. That man standing quietly before him—was he really still the Zhang Qingyue of former days?

At last he spoke, his voice low and faintly hoarse: "Why did you kill him? He was only an old man with one foot in the grave."

The muscles of Ming Li's face seemed to twitch. He raised his eyes to Lin Jinghong—his childhood playmate—and the veins stood out faintly on his face, showing how he was striving to master his emotions; yet that fierce look seemed born into him.

Just as it had been when they were children, and he had known it well. And now here he stood, openly, in the sunlight, questioning him...

Deep in the close forest, it seemed another pair of dark eyes watched coldly the figures of those two men.

Ming Li gazed at him a long while, then said slowly: "He stood in my way."

Lin Jinghong gave a snort. Then he lifted his head to the sky and drew a deep breath, as though speaking to something deep within his own heart; a moment later, when he looked back, his face had turned cold.

He looked hard at Ming Li, at that face once so familiar and now so strange, and said coldly: "From the time of the Liu Miao Village massacre, when only the two of us survived, I have always counted you as my brother. Do you know that?"

The corner of Ming Li's mouth twitched; slowly he nodded.

Lin Jinghong stared at him. "In my heart I always believed that the two of us were the closest of kin. So even when you betrayed Qingyun ten years ago, I still held on to hope—hope that one day you would see your error and return to the righteous path." For the first time a bitter look came over his face, yet beneath that disappointment there lurked hatred, and he sneered: "But in the end I was wrong. I should have understood long ago: you are no longer my finest brother, Zhang Qingyue. You are now the demon cult's butcher, the ruthless Ming Li."

He laughed bitterly, his expression growing more resolute still—and then came a ringing dragon-cry, a blaze of emerald light, as the Dragon-Slaying Sword leaped from its sheath. Sword-energy surged like a dragon, fierce and swelling, eager to taste blood, and against Lin Jinghong's young and angry face it made him look almost savage.

"The bond between us—from this day, cut in two!"

The words rang out like the bite of a nail. With them rose a blade of emerald light that tore the stillness, sweeping low across the hard stone of the ground with a thunderous roar that took long to fade. When the dust settled, what remained was a deep sword-scar in the flagstones, dividing the two men.

Ming Li's expression changed abruptly; even his body, for some reason, trembled slightly. He stared fixedly at that deep groove, and for the first time an unconcealable trace of pain appeared on his face.

So deep was the scar, set into the hard stone, that it could never be erased. He gazed at it so intently that he scarcely heard what Lin Jinghong was saying.

A deep sword-scar—when and where had he seen such a thing before?