Chapter 423 — The Last Echo in the Darkness
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
As these powers burst forth, the dark sky gained yet more patches of light, and the darkness all around was swept clean in an instant; in the air one could faintly make out eighteen towering gods and demons, their faces now holy, now ferocious, their limbs mighty, lit by the glow of the divine powers, on which all manner of runes and veins surfaced.
Caught within their assault was Daoist Lingjing. The Dark Demon Patriarch was not among them. "Daoist Lingjing is the bait! " The Protector Elder was shaken to the core.
As bait, Daoist Lingjing was surely doomed; no one could survive the combined assault of eighteen gods and demons.
Daoist Lingjing's purpose was to sacrifice himself in order to draw out the eighteen deities of the High Heavens. And those eighteen deities were drawn out in order to give the Dark Demon Patriarch a chance to strike them unawares.
Daoist Lingjing was immensely powerful, a man who had dominated an age, who had even dared to contend with Li Zheng for the title of finest under heaven — he had only lost, and forfeited a single finger. Yet in the art of the sneak attack, he was useless. The Dark Demon Cult's teleporting robe and teleporting banner were the finest means of ambush; he would draw out the eighteen deities, the Dark Demon Patriarch would seize the moment to strike, and there was a chance of wounding them grievously. "The Eight Arts of Lingjing!
" A shout rang through the air, magnificent enough to shake the heart: "Never to be heard again!
" The Protector Elder looked up and saw Daoist Lingjing's final moment.
His Eight Arts of Lingjing were no inferior to Li Zheng's Sword Diagram, yet before the attacks of eighteen deities they were of no avail. He was simply unleashing the supreme art he was proudest of, as a painter lays down ink with abandon and gives full play to his talent, as a man of letters writes with all the skill at his command — he wanted to leave his mark on this world, to leave his shadow behind.
At that same moment a great banner unfurled and rolled, and the Dark Demon Patriarch's form appeared behind those gods and demons, dealing them murderous blows.
The banner rolled; his form seemed to appear beside every deity at once, to strike every deity at once.
In a single turn he wounded more than ten of the gods and demons. Thunder crashed in the sky; by the time the sound of the divine powers' eruption reached the ground, no one could tell how many attacks had already passed.
The ripples of those powers made the air now warm, now piercingly cold; gusts of hurricane wind blew down from above, and in a moment ice and snow melted away, and in another moment all was ice and snow again.
The Dark Demon Patriarch's teleporting banner shattered, destroyed in the terrible surge of divine power — but he still had his teleporting robe. The Protector Elder looked up: blood rain was falling from the sky, a fine drizzle that gradually thickened.
Among those twenty stars forever moving in the heavens, one had dimmed; that star tottered, and then, in one violent collision, it went out and fell from the sky.
Daoist Lingjing was dead.
The Protector Elder grieved. Only the Dark Demon Patriarch remained, still fighting; even though he had mastered the Seven Chapters of Creation of the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Sutra, he could not change the outcome of this battle.
In the ruins, the Protector Elder did not raise his head to watch the battle in the sky. He stared fixedly at the flames beside the campfire, and unthinkingly fed firewood into the fire. The flames rose higher, the fire grew fiercer, yet he noticed nothing at all. "Why is this winter so cold.
. .
" Shivering with cold, he unknowingly kept adding wood: "What's wrong with this fire? However it burns, it's still so cold; however much wood I add, it's still so cold.