Chapter 217 — Homeland
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 4 of 7
Three days—for three days Lu Xueling had sat quietly in this desolate place. The world's constraints, the weighty charge—it turned out that only in a place like this was there room to breathe and to flee.
Quietly—let it be an indulgence, just this once; let herself hide.
But in the end, she still had to go.
Her white robes stirred; she had come silently, and now Lu Xueling's figure reappeared, leaving that ruined little temple, passing once more through the doorways of the little houses beneath the crumbling walls. Somehow, as she looked at this place, her gaze seemed already to hold a deep, reluctant tenderness.
In the distant sky, clouds drifted; among the faint layers of cloud, as if brushed by the wind, a thin white line quietly streaked across the heavens. Lu Xueling cast one last look at these houses, turned, and departed, never looking back. That figure in fluttering white walked quietly away through the weeds into the distance.
Above the firmament, the white clouds remained silent as ever.
Only from within the clouds a swift glimmer of light suddenly darted forth, soundless and fast, trailing a few strands of clinging white cloud that scattered away in the air. Soon the light came down upon this abandoned little village.
"Zhizhi, zhizhi."
That familiar monkey cry—the grey-furred, three-eyed monkey leaped to the ground and looked all about. Plainly this wild place pleased it far more than the mountain belly of Huqi Mountain. In a moment the monkey had bounded off of its own accord and burrowed into the thick weeds, who knew where to play.
Hades stood silently at the center of the village, his face expressionless.
Except in his eyes, where the weariness and pain could not be concealed.
He stared blankly at everything around him, slowly turning. The places he had once known so well surfaced one by one in his mind; even the wind that came from afar carried a trace of a familiar scent.
The fragrance of his homeland's soil.
And far behind him, beyond the dense weeds, that white, somewhat lonely figure at last vanished into the distance.
He walked slowly on. The same things that had met Lu Xueling's eyes appeared before him as well: broken walls, mossy stone steps, and at last that shattered, ruined little temple.
But he did not walk over to it. He only gazed at the little temple from afar, lost in a daze. It was there that a young boy's whole life had been changed!
He stood a long while and looked a long while, but in the end he did not go over. After a long time he turned, trod through the wild grass, and walked along the path where the spacing between houses could still barely be made out. He walked very slowly, as if every step were immeasurably heavy, until before the third house in the second row he stopped.
It was a house no different from any of the other ruined ones: the same fallen doors and windows, the same desolate abandonment; even the moss on its stone steps seemed a little thicker than on the others.
Hades's lips began to tremble faintly. For the first time in many years, tears welled in his eyes beyond all restraint. Slowly, he knelt before the little house and buried his head deep in the earth before it, in the wild grass.
What the wind faintly carried was a choked, struggling whisper: "Father. Mother."
He Yin City.
After the catastrophe of the beast demons, He Yin City had been gravely weakened, with countless dead and wounded; but after calamity passes, life must go on. People coming into the city from all directions, and refugees returning home, gradually brought this old town back to life.
On the busiest of its great streets, the finest tavern in all He Yin City was still the Shanhai Yuan, the very place where Zhang Qingyue had stayed when he first came down the mountain in those years. Though because of the calamity it seemed far quieter than it had ten years before—after all, people who had escaped death had little heart left for feasting and drinking.