Chapter 239 — The Older One Grows, the More Absurd
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
At the end of the forest the Blind Elder sat grim-faced, resting on his staff, while the Butcher swung his blade. Around them the spaces lay in stacked, shifting layers, most strange: folded spaces, and with every shift the scenery about them changed as well — now a vast forest, now a scorching desert, now waves towering to the sky, now a whole firmament of stars rushing at their faces.
With every shift a different forbidden art erupted; the divine prohibitions hidden in those spaces unleashed their power, and the Butcher had to hold his ground against the prohibitions that burst forth without warning.
The Butcher raged, "Blind Elder, Granny, my back is about to break. Are you two rested yet?"
The Blind Elder sighed. "I am old. My bones are not what they were. Let me rest a while longer."
"I am no younger than you!"
The Butcher fumed, "And my lower half was only just sewn back on and has not set firm yet! Make me fight any longer and I will show you my top half and my bottom half parting ways!"
The Blind Elder said unhurriedly, "Granny is young. Let her take a turn."
From Granny Zhu's mouth came an aged voice, sneering, "Strong as this old man may be, the lady's body can bear no more. My lady, yield your body to me..."
"Get out of here!" Granny Zhu snapped.
The Butcher's and the Blind Elder's faces turned strange. Granny Zhu's illness was growing graver by the day; ever since she had found them, they had met with danger again and again, and Fan Xuanshu kept leaping out to seize control of Granny Zhu's flesh.
"The demon seed grows stronger and stronger. I fear it is only a matter of time before Old Dame Si is replaced by Fan Xuanshu."
The space about them shifted as though a god were casting dice, each face of the die a different divine prohibition, and they were inside the die: whichever face came up, that face's prohibition would erupt. Only this die had not six faces but one hundred and eight.
This time it came up stars. The ground vanished from beneath their feet, and they found themselves in a boundless starry void, nothing above, nothing below.
Those glittering stars were no true stars but mirrors, mirror upon mirror blazing with light; suddenly countless beams of mirrored light gathered into one and, with a hum, came shining down upon them.
The Butcher roared, and with the vast single-line-of-sky stroke, one blade cleaving the road between life and death, he split that dreadful divine light apart. The severed light went howling past before them and behind them, and only the ground where they stood remained more or less safe.
Granny Zhu called out in alarm, "Deaf Elder, Deaf Elder, come over here, quickly!"
On the far side of the starry void the Deaf Elder was wielding his brush like flying, holding his own against the host of stars. The Blind Elder said, "The Deaf Elder cannot hear your voice..."
Before his words had died away, the Deaf Elder made to fly toward them, only to be struck by a beam of starlight; the light blasted him away, and no one knew where he had gone.
"Butcher, take a rest. My turn!" Fan Xuanshu's voice came from Granny Zhu's mouth.
The Butcher at once stepped back. Granny Zhu came forward, circulating the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Scripture, watching the shifting spaces warily.
Trapped inside this space-folding prohibition were not only the three of them, but also the Deaf Elder, Lord Huo and the Lame Elder — though each was caught on a different face of the die, and it was hard for them to come together.
When Granny Zhu had arrived here and seen the Blind Elder and the others trapped, she had tried to break the spell, only to be caught in it herself. Later the Deaf Elder had tracked them down and tried to undo the space prohibition too, and he had been swallowed up as well.
"This space prohibition holds one hundred and eight faces of divine bans, and the axis of the formation's workings is not among those one hundred and eight faces."