Chapter 199 — Wounds of the Heart
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 2 of 6
The Beast Sovereign did not answer, did not speak. He looked ever more weary, and slowly raised his hand. In the firelight, the skin at his right wrist seemed to have lost its luster, ashen and dull, and faintly, a dark red vein lay hidden within the muscles of his wrist.
The Beast Sovereign looked at that vein for a moment, shook his head, and lightly traced his hand across his wrist. After a moment, a cut slowly opened on the wrist, and slowly a drop of blood welled out.
Blood!
Red blood!
"How is that possible—" The woman in the darkness seemed so astonished that she could not even finish her words; only after a good while did she seem to come to herself, and said in bewilderment, "You—you have actually become human!"
The Beast Sovereign did not speak, only smiled—a smile so silent that none could tell whether it was bitter, or one of relief.
"No wonder. I have been puzzling over it all along—you were born of the baleful qi of heaven and earth, and ought by rights to be beyond death and destruction. How then could you have been so grievously wounded beneath the Immortal-Slaying Sword at the peak of Canglan Mountain? So it was that at some unknown time you had become the very thing you always loathed! Hahaha, hahahaha—"
Whether she found it too absurd or simply could not contain herself, the woman burst out laughing.
The Beast Sovereign's gaze was fixed on the drop of red blood at his wrist, and in his eyes flickered complex feelings beyond words—like joy, like sorrow.
"I have never... loathed humans," he smiled wearily. "That I could come into this world with my own mind and consciousness—was that not also the doing of humans?"
The woman started. "What did you say?"
The Beast Sovereign slowly raised his head and looked toward the flames burning in the fire basin. His voice, in that place where darkness and light flickered in turn, seemed to return to the long, slow years of the past.
"The first time I had consciousness, it was her I saw. I had not even a body then; only, in a daze, that woman seemed to be gazing at me. But as time flowed on, I gradually took form, and at last I came to know that she was a human—the witch maiden of the Wu clan in that generation, and her name was Linglong."
Beside the Beast Sovereign, Taotie gave a low growl.
The Beast Sovereign reached out and stroked its head twice, and Taotie quieted. The woman made not a sound, as though she knew that a secret sealed away in the dust of countless years was about to be uncovered.
In the Beast Sovereign's eyes, tenderness slowly took up all the space; his gaze too turned toward the distant depths of the darkness, toward the far end of the cave—where perhaps some soul of the past was also listening quietly.
"It was Linglong who, with secret witchcraft, gathered and transformed the baleful qi of heaven and earth here in the southern borderlands, and refined its essence to create me."
The Beast Sovereign spoke faintly of this secret that had confounded a thousand myriad years—the secret of his origin, which no one had ever known. "Those so-called heroes of the Wu clan who followed Linglong and insisted on putting me to death—if they knew that I was in fact created by the very lady they revered, I truly wonder what they would feel!"
He smiled faintly; the slaughters and the baleful qi of the past seemed never to have existed upon him at all. What he had now was nothing more than a memory.
"I once asked Linglong many times why she had made me, but she would never say. In the end, though, I came to understand—she too did it for the sake of but two words."
The woman could not help pressing, "What words?"
The Beast Sovereign said indifferently, "Eternal life!"
The woman's voice showed faint surprise. "Eternal life?"