Chapter 249 — Nine Tails
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 3 of 5
Suddenly her eyes flew open, as though she had hit upon something—yet what followed was no grand gesture. Strangely, she lifted a foot and, like some mortal girl stamping her foot in a fit of pique, brought it down hard upon the ground.
"Thump!"
A low, muffled sound rose in the night wind and drifted away on it; a puff of dust billowed up, then settled gently in the breeze. Moments later, from the ground beneath Xiao Bai's feet came a strange crackling, popping sound—a continuous, unbroken series of them that lasted nearly the time it takes to brew half a cup of tea before gradually dying away.
The corner of Xiao Bai's mouth tightened, and her white form suddenly rose like duckweed, drifting upward as though lifted by the wind, incomparably graceful—yet her eyes, brimming with liquid light, remained fixed on the ground below. After a moment, suspended in midair, she suddenly flung out her sleeve and swept it toward the earth.
The sweep carried no small force; several sharp whistles of air being split rang out in the night sky. As the sleeve passed over the ground, sand flew and stones scattered, dust whirling wildly. Nor did Xiao Bai pause in midair: she swept her sleeve downward again and again, seven times in succession, until the dust on the ground had gathered into a small grey tornado, thick with shattered stone and grit, spinning furiously, rising up beneath the starry night.
With a light cry Xiao Bai shot upward another ten feet or more. Beneath the stars her white figure drifted like a fairy's, dazzling to the eye and bearing a beauty all the more bewitching. As she rose, the column of sand and grit was seized by an invisible force and dragged violently upward—then flung abruptly out in the opposite direction. So swift was that wind that in moments the pillar of whirling grit had swept far into the distance, and from the darkness came a continuous rumbling—doubtless the sound of stones smashing against the earth.
And beneath Xiao Bai's feet, where the summit of Mount Huqi had been, there now stood a great pit six feet wide and more than ten feet deep. To carve such a hole in a mountain peak hard as iron with a mere lift of her hand—such cultivation was enough to shock the world. Yet for a Nine-Tailed Celestial Fox with a thousand years of cultivation, it was hardly surprising.
Of course, Xiao Bai had hardly come to the mountaintop in the dead of night out of boredom to dig a hole. Descending slowly from midair, her eyes never once left the pit; her white figure drifted straight down into it. Once inside, her descent slowed sharply, as though some invisible thing were supporting her from below, and she stared intently at the pit's walls, peering closely by the faint starlight from above.
Her slender white hand pressed against the rough stone wall, a striking contrast that gave an uncanny sensation—but Xiao Bai paid it no mind at all. She only followed her palm, followed her slow descent, studying the walls of the pit.
What met her eyes was blue-grey stone, rough and hard, cold as ice to the touch. Then, as she sank slowly lower, her gaze traveled down with her. A foot down, still the same blue-grey rock, without the slightest change, identical to the stone above and to mountain rock everywhere in the world.
She continued to descend, her pale palm resting on the rock wall, drifting gently down. Two feet deep—still the same blue-grey, hard stone.
Three feet...
Four feet...
Five feet...
No change at all. Still that hard rock, its chill seeming to have endured for a thousand ages, and now, suddenly brought to light, radiating coldly from its rough surface.
No expression showed on Xiao Bai's face; her body continued its gentle descent. Then, suddenly, her eyes lit up, and she trembled in midair and stopped.
On the rock wall six feet below the surface, beside her pale hand, the hard stone at last showed its first anomaly.
A faint red trace, like a thin thread of blood, appeared upon the stone.