Chapter 254 — Parting by Death
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 6 of 6
The places where she could set foot grew fewer and fewer, and the little that remained was collapsing fast. Xiao Bai clenched her teeth and sped onward, Ming Li's body in her arms. At this crisis of life and death, at this instant when the whole matter hung by a single thread, she suddenly felt a faint glimmer of light filtering down from above her head. She looked up quickly, and saw that where thick rock had once been, great swaths had caved away; amid the doomsday spectacle of boulders falling thick as rain, through a few narrow crevices the light of the sky was leaking down.
Could it be that the whole of Mount Huqi was about to collapse, and a hole had opened above to the open air?
A flash of resolve crossed Xiao Bai's face. She stamped down hard, sprang from the last remaining rock that still held, and flew upward. Beneath her feet, that stone too collapsed at last into the red shadows—there was no path of retreat left.
The crimson, scorching magma began to roar like an enraged giant, slowly welling upward, seething and churning. Beneath the magma, some immense force seemed to be driving it on; moments later the searing magma exploded with a thunderous roar, transforming into a colossal torrent that surged upward.
Amid that scene of madness, with the searing torrent of magma surging up from below and huge fragments of falling rock dense as raindrops above, Xiao Bai was like a white bird, wings beating in flight, threading through a wild tempest, desperately winging her way toward the sky.
Heaven and earth changed color; dark clouds rolled in billows.
Once the highest peak for a hundred li around, Mount Huqi now slowly sank and collapsed amid thunderous roars and a sky filled with smoke and dust.
The whole earth trembled violently, as though even heaven and earth were terrified by that power.
In the thunderous din, amid the dust and smoke that shot hundreds of zhang toward the horizon, the colossal torrent of searing magma burst straight up from underground and spewed toward the vault of heaven. And beneath that magnificent, terrible spectacle of heaven-and-earth forces, beside the vast magma torrent, a tiny white figure barely—at the very last moment—flew clear of that hellish crater mouth and sped off into the distance.