Chapter 251 — The Monster
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 5 of 5
"Die!"
Countless sudden voices came surging at him like a flood. A thousand, ten thousand crimson arms reached out from the blood-mist, grasping toward Ming Li—a horror beyond all words to describe. Yet this art of ghostly illusions, which against others was a peerless and irresistible dharma, had met its natural nemesis in the "Great Brahma Prajna" that Ming Li carried—the Buddha-dharma famed for stilling the mind.
The supreme wondrous dharma of the Buddhist gate is precisely the great enemy of the ghost path. The ten thousand ghost-faces around him looked surging and overwhelming in their might, but the moment they drew near the golden radiance about Ming Li, they gave out shrill cries and fled in confusion. Those few that could not dodge in time were scorched by the golden Buddha-light, and in an instant vanished into smoke, refined to a handful of ash and scattered on the wind.
With such great dharma to guard his body, Ming Li feared nothing more. He charged forward; though countless ghost-faces lay ahead, none dared face him, and they all fell back in retreat. With a *puff*, he had burst out through the body of the blood-qi giant and came rushing forth.
"Boom!"
The giant of blood and qi let out a strange, furious roar, and its vast body began slowly to turn. Ming Li had passed through cleanly enough, but his expression had grown grave. This monster was formed entirely of blood and qi—shaped, but without substance. His earlier thrust had pierced it through, and plainly done it no harm at all. Which meant, it seemed, that he could only take blows without returning them; and judging by the terrifying abundance of the creature's spiritual power—with the spiritual energy of the cavern surging and brimming as it did—Ming Li could clearly feel scattered motes of it streaming ceaselessly into the giant's body. At this rate, he would only wear himself out first.
Just as Ming Li fixed his mind on how to deal with this blood-and-qi monster that seemed impossible to defeat, the giant itself was the first to change. Its enormous body of blood and qi suddenly collapsed, as though it were disintegrating, and countless streams of blood and qi came surging out, forming a dense crimson mist that churned violently in midair—yet showed no sign of dispersing. Instead it gathered ever more tightly, until at last it became a sphere of blood-red some hundred feet across, like a red sun blazing ten thousand rays of crimson light through the air.
While Ming Li stood stunned, a tremendous crash burst forth from deep within that sphere of blood. Moments later, out of the mass of blood mist condensed into a ball, fully thousands of red tentacles shot out, each as thick as the mouth of a bowl and stretching dozens of yards long, wreathed in seething blood and qi as they danced and darted through the air.
In an instant the whole vast cavern became a sea of red tentacles. The blood-flames of a moment ago had been mighty, but Ming Li could evade them; now, faced with hundreds upon hundreds of tentacles everywhere at once—dreadful and terrifying—even Ming Li felt his scalp prickle and his face change color.
From the first exchange of spells with Xiao Hui—the corrosive spheres, the summoned skeletons—to the later transformation into a giant of blood and qi, and now this grotesque blood sphere with its thousands of tentacles: the strange power and mysterious formation within this cavern seemed to possess an inexhaustible store of uncanny arts and bizarre powers, savage and murderous, yet endlessly changing. It could not but drive a man to despair, leaving him powerless to answer it.