Chapter 233 — Folding Paper into a Boat
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 4 of 4
The Daoists followed him in. The village was utterly ruined, cobwebs hanging everywhere, and even the stone statues in the village were battered and broken.
Strangely, every other ruin had beasts that came in to shelter from the darkness, yet in this village there was not a single demon beast.
The Daoists were full of doubt and alarm. Long Jiaonan, who now wore the shape of a handsome young woman Daoist, whispered, "There is something strange about this place..."
Even as she spoke, darkness descended, and the air turned suddenly and bitterly cold. A lone boat came drifting slowly in from another world, a lantern hung at its prow, and beneath the lantern sat an old man, tying paper figures, paper horses, and paper boats.
The old man came into the village, stepped straight ashore, and everyone shuddered several times over, feeling as though their very souls might freeze stiff.
The old man set down a paper boat. The paper boat floated up, and one of the Daoists suddenly discovered that at some unknowable moment he had come to be sitting inside that paper boat, drifting away into the darkness.
Astonished, he looked around in alarm, and saw that another version of himself was still sitting in the village.
That was his husk.
"Brother Daoist."
Shen Mu brought forth the Zhenxing Dihou True Art, took on the form of a man's head upon a serpent's body, and behind him rose the Gate of Receiving Heaven. He saluted the old man, spoke a sentence in the Youdu tongue, took out the portraits of the headman, the pill master, and the rest, and asked, "May I make so bold as to ask, brother Daoist, whether you have seen these people?"
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