Chapter 299 — Snow-White Flying Bats
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 4
I can only have our scouts follow at a distance to see you on your way. Take care along the road. " Shen Mu thanked him, seated himself on the Dragon Qilin's back, and galloped toward the Duck-Tongue Strip between the two nations. Behind him the scouts of Qingmen Pass followed far back on all manner of strange beasts. When they reached the Duck-Tongue Strip in the middle of the two lands, a body of riders suddenly appeared on the far side as well, oddly dressed and mounted on camel-wings, those strange beasts of the steppe—Mandi Kingdom scouts, surely.
The two sides spied each other from afar and struck almost in the same instant; sword-pellets and blade-orbs flew across the sky, clashing with a din of ding and dang.
Suddenly the Qingmen Pass scouts opened several gourds, and clouds and mist came howling out, shrouding ten-odd li in every direction so that the eye could see no more than a dozen or so zhang. At once each side lost track of the other, and a rare quiet settled over the field. Shen Mu opened the Azure Empyrean Eye; his sight pierced the fog and picked out the road, and the Dragon Qilin made use of the mist to press on toward the far side of the Duck-Tongue Strip. "The Emperor did indeed take my advice and gather cloud, mist, thunder and lightning as weapons.
With Mandi massing so many troops, breaking through Qingmen Pass will not be easy. " The Duck-Tongue Strip was very long, stretching a thousand li.
It belonged to the Wastes, and by night it was the barrier that cut the two nations off from each other. Once inside the Wastes, the greatest peril was the darkness. Shen Mu was a castoff born and raised in the Wastes, and he knew well what mattered most there; so he surveyed the land on every side, searching for ruins, stone statues, anything of the kind.
If he could not return to Qingmen Pass before dark, he would have to spend the night in the Wastes, and so he first had to find a place where he could shelter.
The Duck-Tongue Strip was utterly quiet; along the whole way he saw not a single bird or beast. Shen Mu's expression grew grave.
The absence of any bird or beast here meant that there was no safe ground; when night came, even the strange beasts of the Wastes could not survive in this place. He passed a lake, blue as a jewel, its surface utterly still, without a single ripple. It was a dead lake; there were no fish or shrimp in it.
"There is no place to hide from the darkness in the lake either. " Shen Mu steadied himself and went on.
Unawares, the Dragon Qilin had carried him out of the Duck-Tongue Strip; the peaks around them gradually grew steep and sheer, and a gorge opened before them. Sitting on the Dragon Qilin's back, Shen Mu saw that the trees in the gorge grew every which way, sprouting from the cliffs as though they had thrown off the earth's magnetic essence and grown sideways, roofing over the sky above the gorge. He seemed to have entered a world turned upside down, where the cliffs were the ground.
The great trees were exceedingly ancient; some were so thick that a dozen men could not have encircled them. Their roots coiled like writhing dragons, and beneath the roots ghost-fires and phosphorescent glimmers showed—the white bones of colossal beasts, some of which Shen Mu could not even name.
Strangely, those remains lay upon the cliffs, not fallen to the bottom of the gorge.
And the leaves that came loose from the trees did not drift down to the gorge floor either, but fell upon the cliffs. The gorge itself was astonishingly clean; not a withered branch or rotting leaf was to be seen. Thud.
The Dragon Qilin, paying no heed, bumped into a great boulder floating in the air; the stone spun lazily aside and went on floating as before. In the gorge path ahead, stones drifted—great and small.
"Hierarch, we must have entered the Nether Valley by now?
" the Dragon Qilin asked in its muffled, booming voice.