Chapter 190 — Anomaly
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 7
The setting sun hung far off at the edge of the sky, and behind the tall, steep, rolling ranges it scattered its last warmth over the land of the Southern Border. Its dim yellow light fell upon the silent earth, and the wilds lay bleak and desolate, all stern and still.
Ming Li and Jin Pingyue, having left Fenxia Valley, stood upon the wasteland before the Hundred Thousand Savage Mountains. Facing those towering peaks and that vast expanse that seemed to stretch on without end, they were like two utterly inconsequential little creatures gazing up at the enormous presence of heaven and earth, watching the dying sun at the horizon sink bit by bit behind the boundless mountains as the sky slowly darkened.
In the space of a breath, in the turning of the stars, who could ever outlast time?
Leaving Fenxia Valley had been Ming Li's suggestion. Only, having chanced that day to overhear the conversation among Yun Yifeng and the other two of Fenxia Valley, he already knew that the valley might possess another method by which the "Eight Ferocious Mystic Fire Formation" could perhaps be awakened—a rare opportunity. Given the purpose that had brought Ming Li and Jin Pingyue here in the first place, they ought to have kept themselves hidden and observed carefully a while longer.
Yet for some reason, Ming Li, with a face utterly blank, had nonetheless proposed leaving Fenxia Valley—and Jin Pingyue, usually so acute, seemed not to have considered the matter at all, and had agreed with surprising readiness.
Once away from Fenxia Valley, Ming Li and Jin Pingyue spoke but little along the way, nor did they discuss how to proceed with their pursuit. Yet the two seemed to share an unspoken understanding, and without consultation they both headed south, until today they had come before that fabled place of terror, the "Hundred Thousand Savage Mountains." Beneath the black hills and the dying sun, in the desolate wilds, the two stood in silence gazing at that range.
The wind over the wasteland carried not the least fragrance of grass or flower; there was only the faint stench and the distant howls drifting from some nameless place far off. In this land, even the wind beside them seemed fierce and malevolent.
Jin Pingyue's hair stirred softly in the wind. She lifted her head slightly, revealing the smooth, delicate line of her chin and a stretch of pale neck, and gazed at the distant mountains. Above the black peaks hung a dense, gray fog, ceaselessly churning and rolling. What sort of world lay behind those ranges, no one could say.
Others might only guess—but in Jin Pingyue's veiled, complicated eyes, something seemed to be shining.
Unlike the silent, bewitching woman beside him, Ming Li, though he too spoke little, had carried in his heart all along this road thoughts that surged and crashed like monstrous waves.
First was the matter of the blood sacrifice, which had struck him deeply. Over the years he himself had taken no few lives, and had even earned among the Demon Cult the title "Blood Young Master"—yet toward what he had heard days ago in Fenxia Valley he felt an instinctive repulsion and loathing, as though it touched some obsession rooted in the depths of his heart since childhood. And afterward, from a remark Jin Pingyue let fall as though carelessly, he had abruptly realized something he had long overlooked: within the Demon Cult—even in the Mingwang himself—there might well be those doing things similar to what Fenxia Valley was about to do...
To take the blood of countless living men and offer it in sacrifice to gods—and those gods, needless to say, must be fierce gods, malevolent gods;
and the blood sacrifice itself was in its very nature a thing that wounds the harmony of heaven and is utterly inhuman. And such things were happening right beside him.
What sort of world was this?
Had everyone in this world gone mad?