劍問蒼天 - 第198章 迷局 - 翰墨軒

It was a blank spirit tablet!

Then whose spirit was it that was honored here, in this solemn Ancestral Shrine?

And who had set it among the masters of every generation to share their incense? And having set it there, why had no name been written upon it?

Lin Jinghong had clutched that wooden tablet in a death grip, refusing to let go even in the depths of grievous injury and unconsciousness—what did that mean?

Doubts upon doubts, threads beyond counting, seemed to coil around every heart.

The southern borderlands, the Hundred Thousand Wild Mountains, the Ancient Cave of Demon Quelling.

Legend is a very strange thing. First, the word itself seems to carry no promise of reliability; it is only that certain matters appear to have some reason to be passed down, and so people tell them from mouth to mouth, or some man of letters sets them down in writing and they survive. Second, the longer a legend is handed down, the more distant it grows, and the legend itself tends to change by slow degrees—the people and events of that year gradually lose their true faces. With countless tellers adding spice and the years wearing all things smooth, who still remembers the truth of those days?

And who still cares?

So at last the legend becomes mere legend, like that woman of city-toppling beauty and gentleness, slowly changing her countenance in the passage of time.

After ten million years, would you still know her?

In the darkness, the sinister wind seemed to have stilled; that wild and reckless blowing seemed to belong only to the world outside this ancient cave, and within this dark world all was quiet.

This was the deepest place in the Ancient Cave of Demon Quelling. Here it was that Black Wood had once brought the five tribes' sacred vessels of the southern borderlands and revived the body of the Beast Sovereign. But today the seething, surging demonic aura that had once filled this place had vanished without a trace, leaving only silence—and now and then a low, faint panting.

It was panting, coming from the deepest dark, and with it a faint, uncanny dark red glow kindled in that dark and rather empty-seeming space.

A low growl suddenly rose from the depths of the darkness, from the very place where the panting came, fierce as a savage beast yet thick with unease, and even with a trace of fear that could be made out—baring its teeth, snarling in fury at that point of red light.

The low panting paused, as though something had soothed that strange beast in the dark; the growling sank gradually, and at last died away, and silence returned to the cave. Only that eerie dark red fire still flickered, on and on, flashing without cease.

Then suddenly a woman's voice, pleasing to the ear yet seemingly devoid of feeling, echoed faintly through the cavern: "That Taotie of yours seems never to have taken a liking to me."

The space of this dark place seemed truly vast; the woman's voice seemed to travel far, drifting and floating, hollow and empty—yet by the sound of it, it came from behind that point of dark red fire.

What answered her was a calm laugh. "Pay it no mind. It has never trusted humans."

The woman gave a soft snort. "Oh? So it has already taken me for a human, has it?"

"Hou—" A low roar swept through the air in an instant, and in front of that dark red fire a blaze of flame suddenly flared up. It was a brazier of archaic form, three-legged, thick with rust, of an age beyond reckoning—yet the fire burning in it was still so vivid, vivid as the garments beyond the flames.

Vivid, silken garments.

The Beast Sovereign!

He sat on the ground between the firelight and the shadows of the dark, leaning sidelong against the stone wall of a platform. The flames leaped and danced, lighting his face now bright, now dim; it still bore a trace of that indescribably strange, bewitching beauty, but unlike the time of his first resurrection, his face was now deathly pale—one could well say he looked like ashes.