Chapter 191 — The Leak
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 6
The southern borderlands. The Ten Thousand Wild Mountains.
Having crossed the black mountain range and entered the Ten Thousand Wild Mountains, Ming Li felt as though he had stepped into a truly savage, primeval world. In the Demon Sect, "the wilds" originally referred to a vast, uninhabited stretch in the far northwest of the Divine Land, where most of the land was gobi and desert, barren of grass; whatever life there was consisted of exceedingly tenacious wild remnants, and that was how the name had arisen. The legendary holy hall of the Demon Sect was said to lie somewhere in that region, though Ming Li had never been there.
But the world before his eyes now was plainly nothing like that legendary wasteland. Inside the Ten Thousand Wild Mountains there was not merely no scarcity of grass—there was a veritable tangle of it. Along the whole way they had passed stretch after stretch of primeval forest so dense there was scarcely room to set foot; every patch of ground seemed packed with plants fighting for living space. And behind the endless trees and thorns lurked, it seemed, endless venomous creatures and savage beasts. In the shadows nearby there always seemed to be a malignant, snarling gaze spying on you, waiting for a chance to strike, to put you to death and make you into a fine meal.
For men of Ming Li's and Jin Pingyue's caliber, such ordinary venomous creatures hardly amounted to a special threat, but an endless succession of them was truly a headache. They could, to be sure, ride the air in flight, but for one thing, above that primeval forest miasmal fogs and poisonous vapors might rise at any moment; for another, deep as their cultivation ran, they still needed rest, and harried by such constant harassment from without, they had scarcely a moment's pause.
After a few days, even the monkey Xiaohui was beginning to grow restless.
Beyond the harassment of those poisonous fogs and savage beasts, the bizarre weather of the Ten Thousand Wild Mountains was itself a rather trying affair. Utterly unlike the central plains, there was no process of clouds gathering or the sky turning; here the rain came almost the instant it willed. The sky would be clear one moment, and in the next a torrential downpour was crashing down; and when it was ready to stop, it stopped just as abruptly—one moment lightning and thunder, the next ten thousand li without a cloud, leaving a man speechless.
And the duration of the rain seemed to follow no rule at all—short spells of a moment or two, long ones lasting several days, quite impossible to fathom.
At this moment the two of them were walking through a black forest shrouded in unbroken, sullen rain.
The reason they had not used spells to fly was that, when they meant to do so, they discovered that in this uncanny place, even while it rained, strange black vapors still rose above the black forest; the air over the ground beneath the trees, by contrast, was relatively normal.
Ming Li and Jin Pingyue were both figures long steeped in the Demon Sect, their judgment far from ordinary, and they naturally knew the weight of such things. After discussion they were content to be prudent and make their way through the black forest on foot.
This forest was like many of the primeval forests in the Ten Thousand Wild Mountains: the leaves and branches grew thick and close, so that the rain from the sky often could not fall straight to the ground but ran down along the branches from the dense tips and canopies. A cold chill hung throughout the forest, and apart from the rustle of their footsteps and the far-off sound of rain, the whole forest seemed to sleep in the downpour.