Chapter 963 — Blood Falls Like Rain in the Cold Night

Out in the darkness beyond the city, bellowing roars shook the ear, growing louder and louder, and out of that darkness walked monsters of mountainous bulk.

Panic seized the people within the city. These were monsters that seemed to have stepped out of a nightmare, the ugliest and most vicious things fantasy could devise: some were like men overgrown with tentacles, some had eyes crawling all over their bodies, some were like flowers of flesh and blood, some like plant and human fused into one—a thousand shapes, ten thousand strangenesses. Yet those that came after them were ancient gods with birds' heads and human bodies, ox heads and human bodies, beast heads and human bodies, along with colossal dread dragons, many-headed serpents, and pot-bellied giants.

There were also things like bizarre, grotesquely altered creatures: giants whose arms were sharpened drills, and others whose bodies sprouted keen blades and swords all over, walking siege engines.

Toot-toot— A great ship wrought of flesh and blood came puffing thick smoke, its hull covered in long arms, its underside swarming with numberless legs and feet, and upon it crowded people with only half a body, beating gongs and drums, blowing, plucking, singing, playing.

The ship of flesh and blood danced to the music; at its bow a vast bloody maw opened, its fangs like row upon row of steel blades, opening and closing, as it came joyfully toward the city of the Creators.

The moon rose in the sky, and moonlight spilled down. Strange laughter came from on high; Shen Mu looked up and saw that the moon had grown a human face, and from it issued eerie laughter.

More than that, the moon had grown arms too, and from somewhere it produced a flute—a flute polished from a Creator's leg bone—which the face in the moon set to its lips and played a merry tune! Shen Mu withdrew his gaze.

The night of this Taixu land was like some uncanny dream, filling a person with a sense of the absurd and the strange.

Whoosh—a titanic thing dropped from the sky onto the gate tower: a great bird covered in human faces, its wings composed of white bone, which crushed half the gate tower down.

The faces on the bird stared up in fevered excitement at the handful of people left in the city, and those faces gave out strange and uncanny laughter. The bones that made up the bird's wings were hollow; suddenly all the bones together spouted streams of air and flame, and from within the bones came sharp, ear-splitting whistles; the air and fire propelled the monstrous bird aloft, up into the sky!

Amid the shrieking, the nightmare monsters outside the city set their feet in motion, rumbling toward the city of the Creators!

"Heavens.

.

.

" A female true deity shuddered, staring blankly at the sight. "What kind of world is this?

" This was the world the Taixu Creators had made.

This world was composed of divine consciousness; the Creators had visualized the whole world with their divine consciousness, creating all things, creating civilization.

Yet because invaders from beyond had breached one of those worlds, inner demons had bred throughout Taixu.

Though the Taixu land remained intact, there was no Youdu here, no place where the dead returned—and that led to another consequence.

The dead had nowhere to go and could only wander Taixu, where they merged with the divine consciousness of those Creators, and so were born living beings unlike any life in the world. Nor were the dead Creators alone in forming such Taixu monsters; the gods and demons of the Heavenly Court who had perished in Taixu did so as well.

Boom!

A violent tremor ran through the ground; outside the city the Taixu monsters slammed into the wall, and the seemingly indestructible wall of the Creators' city shook with a crash, cracks appearing one after another, shocking to behold.

But the city was made from the Creators' divine consciousness, and the cracks quickly healed themselves, to the relief of everyone within.

Boom—again the impact came, dull yet vast, one after another, and the mirror-smooth wall had no time to heal.

Suddenly the south gate collapsed, and the Taixu monsters outside poured into the city like a tide!

"Prepare to meet the enemy!

" someone shouted loudly. At that very moment the north gate too collapsed with a crash, then the east and west gates—all of them flattened by those Taixu monsters.

The gigantic monsters ran riot through the city that now held only them, and wherever they passed, houses fell and buildings toppled.

Myriad Taixu monsters surged in like a flood; the people stood on the high ground, their hearts frozen. On the arrow tower a woman screamed, leaped into the air, and flew skyward, trying to escape this nightmare city through the air.

But as she rose into the sky, she saw the human-faced moon above give a piercing shriek, and a white-boned, human-faced monster bird beat its wings and charged at her.

Countless more monstrous birds flew out from the human-faced moon, a black mass of them, and the moonlight too turned strange: the moon was blood-red, like a bleeding human face.

The melody the human-faced moon played turned strangely cheerful as well, even a little playful.

The music carried down from the sky, and the Taixu monsters below became feverishly excited.

Soon the woman who had flown up was torn to pieces by the flock of birds, and blood fell from above—first a thin drizzle, then a torrential downpour.

A rain of blood fell from the heavens; it was the moon bleeding, and the sky was like a painting dyed red with fresh blood, gore blanketing heaven and earth.

The monstrous birds in the sky swooped down, and the crowded horde of monsters soon reached the place where Shen Mu and the others stood and drowned them!

In that moment no one could spare a thought for old grudges, nor for obeying their master's command to slay Mu Tianzun; they had only one thought now—to survive!

Without a word Shen Mu roused the Gate of Heaven-Bearing, but to the chill of his heart it would not open.

Since these monsters were transformed from wronged souls who had died in Taixu, spells and divine powers aimed at souls would be most effective against them; but Taixu and Youdu were not in the same time and space, and so it could not be opened.

"If I could open the Gate of Heaven-Bearing, cutting my way out would be easy beyond measure.

A pity. " He roused the divine arts of Youdu, joining vital essence and divine consciousness to visualize a white banner, and as an ancient-god-shaped monster charged him he swung it with all his strength.

"But though I am not my elder brother, in all this world there are fewer than five whose mastery of Youdu's divine arts can surpass mine!

" The soul within that monster at once flew out and fell into the white banner.

The banner had been blank, empty of everything; now a man had appeared within it.

The man was dazed and muddled, his face contorted, struggling to fly out of the banner; though the banner was wrought from vital essence and divine consciousness and was very thin, it seemed to hold a space within.

The man's twisted face pushed out from the banner, bulging the space inside out of shape.

Shen Mu drove the banner hard into the ground, a low, muffled roar rising from his throat: "Where my body stands, there is Youdu!

" Boom—his vital essence burst apart and poured out as rolling Youdu demonic qi, in an instant sweeping the hundred-odd mu of land around him and turning it into a world of darkness.

Within the divine treasury of his primal fetus, his spirit-fetus primordial spirit raised a foot and stamped it down hard; at once the taiji beneath his feet churned over, heaven and earth spun, heaven below and earth above, and the ground became the world of Youdu.

Shen Mu's body merged with his primordial spirit, and with a shake he became the three-eyed Tubo, his frame swelling to some hundred zhang, towering like a mountain, not much smaller than those monsters.