Chapter 497 — Erecting a Stele and Inscribing Words
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Time swept the mountains and rivers and the earth itself clean, carried away the people of the past, and left behind only history—remembered, or forgotten.
The years are like a song, and that song must be bleak and mournful.
Shen Mu stood atop the chest, embracing that girl. Sunlight poured down like the years themselves, and at the moment the light fell upon him, the maiden in his arms turned to flying sand and streamed backward with the receding darkness.
The sunlight was clear and pure, scattering over the glittering yellow sands of the great desert, glinting off the scale-like dunes. This place had once been a valley; the hills around it were not tall, yet they had been green and fair, with clear water running.
But the years had woven past and left nothing here but sand filling the sky.
Shen Mu jumped down from the chest. Though he had known it would be so, he still could not hide the melancholy in his heart.
The chest opened its lid and tossed Long Qilin out. The great chest seemed puzzled too: a moment ago there had been several hundred people in its belly—how had they vanished so suddenly?
Long Qilin was frightened and uneasy as well. He had always been superstitious and terribly afraid of ghosts, and now he was so terrified that he buried his head in the sand.
Shen Mu looked up. Before him stood a bare cliff, standing alone amid the desert sands. Through tens of thousands of years of dust and sandstorms it had never weathered, never crumbled.
On the cliff face were characters he had left there tens of thousands of years ago.
"Human life is greater than Heaven!"
Shen Mu was stunned. He had, after all, left something of himself in history.
All of last night had been no afterglow of history, nor any dream. He could not explain the wondrous experience of that night, could not explain why he had returned to thirty or forty thousand years ago, why he had undergone a dark invasion alongside the people of Bailong City.
Nor could he explain why he had come back to the present, why the Shanghuang era had vanished after the darkness passed.
And yet all of it had truly happened!
He had fought shoulder to shoulder with people from tens of thousands of years ago, watched them cast away their heads and spill their hot blood, watched the suffering the people of history had endured—and he had seen the slaughter and devastation wrought when another Heavenly Court went to destroy the Heavenly Court of the Shanghuang era!
"The Shanghuang era was destroyed, and the Kaihuang era was destroyed too. Was the Heavenly Court that destroyed both eras the same Heavenly Court?"
He had his guesses, but no proof to confirm them.
"Perhaps the one that means to destroy Jingping is that same Heavenly Court as well? Where do they come from?"
From beneath the chest, Ban Gongcuo slipped out without a sound. He raised his head and looked at that lone cliff in the desert, studied the characters upon it, and said unhurriedly, "Hierarch Shen, you must be feeling very lost now, very desolate. That girl of the Bai family may have liked you, and you may have liked her very much too—only she knew she was to part from you, and so she never said it aloud. Time is so heartless..."
His eyes flickered. Behind him the gourd opened silently, and one after another, orbs of blood floated up without a sound.
Ban Gongcuo stared fixedly at Shen Mu's back. The blood orbs in the air writhed like venomous snakes, and his voice was like a venomous snake too, boring into Shen Mu's heart, gnawing at his soul, ravaging his Dao heart, poisoning his Dao heart, making this youth show a flaw.
"If you had stayed in that era, perhaps your life would have turned out utterly different from now."