Chapter 228 — Blood Omen
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 6 of 6
You Si stared at his back for a long while, the gauze over her face stirring faintly though there was no wind. After a time she said no more, turned straight around, opened the heavy stone door, and walked out.
With a heavy rumble the stone door slowly swung shut once more, and silence settled over the Chamber of Cold Ice and Stone. Gazing at that serene, beautiful face, faintly touched with a peaceful smile, even the deep, sharp gaze of the Ghost King at last softened, little by little.
In silence he sat down beside the cold stone bed, his eyes fixed only on Bili, filled with an inexpressible longing and grief. And it seemed that only at moments like this, when he faced his daughter alone, did he ever let slip these small traces of weakness.
But who could say?
Or rather, could even the Ghost King himself understand it?
No one knew.
And outside the Chamber of Cold Ice and Stone, Yousi had taken only a few steps from the place when she stopped again, frowned, and looked around.
Perhaps it was because she had been inside that thick, utterly sealed chamber of cold ice and stone that, although she had sensed that strange and uncanny power, the destruction it had wrought around her was not severe; of course, to have torn several cracks in stone walls of such extreme hardness, that force was already no small matter.
Yet outside the Chamber of Cold Ice and Stone, what she saw was far worse. Within the crisscrossing passages carved out by the Ghost King Sect, everything was in chaos; fallen fragments of rock lay everywhere, and from the distance came, now and again, the urgent shouts of people and the moans of the injured.
Clearly, that mysterious power had done graver damage to Fox Qi Mountain than anyone had expected.
And amid all this bustle and confusion, Yousi noticed something else out of the ordinary: in these well-ventilated passages, at some unknowable moment, the air had come to be filled with a faint smell of blood.
Where this reek of blood came from she did not know, yet it seemed to be everywhere; wherever she went, she could feel it. Faint as it was, it still left Yousi deeply uncomfortable. But there were already too many troubles weighing on her now, and she had no mind to fret over this one as well.
To her it felt as though a breath were pent up in her chest, and all she wanted, no matter what, was to burst out of this mountain's belly and breathe the air outside. So she thought, and so she did.
Yousi's figure soon vanished into the passages within the mountain, yet that faint smell of blood seemed still to be quietly seeping through the place...