Chapter 185 — Mad Dog
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 7
After that great calamity of the beast demons, from north to south every place one came upon was a desolation too cruel to look at: a thousand li without a soul, a hundred villages without a human voice—these were things met with every day. The north had suffered the poison only briefly, and so fared somewhat better; the farther south one went, the more savage the ruin grew.
Broken walls and toppled roofs, fallen towns and ruined cities—everywhere, beyond counting. In the open fields and by the borders of the fields, in the bare earth, one could from time to time come upon white bones glinting stark, and that was more shocking still. The wind blew bleak and the smoke hung thin, a whole landscape of dreariness; in this churning mortal world men were as grass and ants, utterly unable to hold their own fates.
Many of the common folk who had fled north, once they were sure this calamity had truly receded, began slowly to return to their homes. Over that boundless desolation, human warmth began little by little to stir again. Yet this scene still carried much sorrow in it: along both sides of the roads, corpses still lay fallen to the ground, and not seldom—some slain by the beast demons, and some, after the disaster had passed, perishing of hunger and cold on the road home, ending their lives in a strange land. Here and there in a few out-of-the-way places, small bands of beast demons still lingered, and now and then rumors went about of beast demons doing men harm. But by this time the great tide had turned; the small bands of beast demons, though still terrifying, could no longer block the will of so many to go home.
And even those beast demons lingering on in their last gasps vanished soon enough, in fact. For among the countless common folk returning home there were also many disciples of the righteous sects; wherever word spread of beast demons harming men, these righteous disciples would soon bring them to heel.
In that great battle at Qingyun that day, the Beast Lord had been defeated beneath the Immortal-Slaying Ancient Sword, but had not died on the spot. The men of the righteous path were no fools; the demon cult knew to strike a man when he was down and to root out the grass entirely—and the righteous naturally understood the principle of "leaving no evil unextirpated."
Therefore many righteous sects sent out their favored disciples, and some of the smaller sects came out in full force. If one could seize the Beast Lord, then across the whole world, what credit and renown would that not be? And besides, the Beast Lord was a peerless demon; that he carried no peerless treasure or divine artifact about him—not even a fool would believe that.
Such guesses and schemes, mingled in the stream of people, spread like the tide and surged southward. Behind the world's gradual return to quiet, it seemed as though countless people were holding their breath and watching. By comparison, the sufferings of the common folk drew few to care.
With this southbound tide of returning folk walked Zhou Yixuan, Xiao Wan, and the Wild Wolf Daoist, and what they felt was unlike that of those around them.
Zhou Yixuan still gripped that bamboo pole, and on it still hung the white cloth bearing the four characters "Immortal Points the Way"—save that the white had, in these years of flight and chaos, gone blotched black and yellow, and one could see several holes worn through at a glance. The cool wind blew, and the banner still stirred in the breeze, but not a trace of the immortal remained in it; it was all the drooping dejection of decline.