Chapter 420 — A Great Terror
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
In Jingping's Hezhou, morning, and the sea fog lay vast and blind.
The soldiers manning Hezhou's defenses would find it hard to forget that sight even many years later: over the grey, mist-shrouded sea, a colossal narwhal leaped from the harbor, its immense body arcing above their heads like a dark cloud settling over the shipyards of Hezhou.
Then the whale shrank smaller and smaller, and fell into the city.
Before the soldiers in the city had gathered their wits, another vast shadow came sailing out of the sea fog — a turtle-shell ship, its hull crusted with every manner of shell, a Xuanwu banner streaming in the sea wind.
The great ship made straight for the harbor's shipyards, and looked about to smash into them, when suddenly the turtle-shell vessel rose several dozen zhang off the ground, grew four legs, and strode over the decks of the tower ships one after another, rumbling into the city.
The soldiers stared dumbly at the great ship striding past them. Upon it, serpents coiled — huge Tengshe snakes rattling their wings as they wound about the masts. And the soldiers aboard were strange of form: turtle-backed, man-bodied, with Tengshe coiled around them, a bizarre symbiosis.
Tanzhou, too, met with strange happenings. Tanzhou was famed for its thousand pools; within and without the city walls lay more than a thousand deep pools, bottomless in their depth.
On this day, all at once the thousand pools ran dry; the water and the fish in them vanished utterly. Many who peered down into the pools saw, at the bottom of each, a gate wrought of bronze.
The prefect of Tanzhou ordered men down to inspect the pool bottoms, and they reported back: "The bronze gates at the bottom are sealed with a binding seal. They cannot be opened."
The prefect was startled and uncertain, when suddenly one of the bronze gates swung open and out stepped a man whose whole body was covered in scales. He turned and locked the gate behind him, then bellowed down into it: "I know, I know, you tiresome woman! The Human Emperor has summoned me, and I go to help him in keeping the oath of our ancestors... I am not one for brawling and bloodshed — I am the mildest-tempered man of all our Earthwalking clan! What are you staring at? Stare again and I will smash your kneecaps with one punch... Not you, I mean these mud-turtle giants up above... I know to lock the gate, more nagging than my own mother!"
The prefect and his men stood at the pool's edge and watched a dwarf some five chi tall, his face covered in bristling whiskers, carefully lock the bronze gate and then climb up onto the bank.
The prefect stepped forward, curious: "Brother..."
The scale-covered dwarf eyed him warily. "Mud-turtle giant, do not think to set your schemes on our Earthwalking clan. It was settled between us long ago: the world above belongs to you mud-turtle giants, and the world below to us."
The prefect was struck dumb, but the dwarf raised his voice toward the pool: "Wife! Let the water out, lest these giants come and steal our underground world!"
At once the waters surged and churned in pool after pool, and soon every pool was filled again, green waves rippling like scales, teeming with fish.
The prefect was about to ask a question when the dwarf suddenly burrowed into the ground and vanished.
The prefect and his men were left gaping: "There are people living underground? How do they survive down there?"
And in Liuzhou in the south, where the Willow Immortal is much worshipped, it came to pass that a willow tree took on spirit and transformed into an azure dragon, and flew away.
Strange happenings occurred again and again throughout the realm, and for a time the villages and townships buzzed with talk.
"Shen'er, these are the formations I saw in the heavens that day. I had no time to examine them closely, and this is all I can recall."