Chapter 502 — The Shenwang Hall of the Netherworld
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Shen Mu and Long Qilin stared blankly, heads thrown back, at the colossus beside them, and could not find their voices.
The Taotie stood at their side like a goat the size of a mountain peak, its forelimbs immensely powerful, its hind limbs thick and short, its coat bearing bronze-colored markings, ring upon ring.
The creature had a face like a man's, yet its features were monstrously strange: its eyes grew beneath its armpits, at the place where the forelegs joined the chest; its mouth was square and wide, crowded with tiger fangs; its goat horns jutted out like spikes — it looked utterly savage!
Xing An's box had been refined from the hide and bone of a Taotie; the hide was the box's outer covering, the bone its frame.
Consider this: Shen Mu owned two Taotie pouches, and the Taotie hide used for both of them together was no more than a foot square. Yet the whole outside of this great box was Taotie hide!
Add to that the Taotie bone bracing the space within, and this box was luxury beyond all compare!
Shen Mu's Taotie pouches had not changed, because the space inside them was not joined to the world outside; the box, however, was joined to the outer space, and so it had become a Taotie!
The box had changed slowly, most likely because the space within it was a world unto itself; this time, after it spat out the people in its belly and opened, its inner space came into connection with Fengdu, so that the box too was affected by the realm of the living dead in Fengdu.
Shen Mu drew back his gaze and hurriedly clutched the Taotie pouch at his waist, thinking, "My Taotie pouches must be kept safe as well. I must never open them, or it will not be two Taotie pouches hanging at my waist, but me hanging at the waists of two Taoties..."
To be hung at the waist of two Taoties the size of mountain ranges, squeezed between them, would be no pleasant business at all; whether they squeezed or tugged, he would die a most wretched death!
The Taotie that the great box had become lifted a paw, still bewildered, quite unable to fathom why such a change had come over it.
But it did not ponder long; in the next instant it stretched its legs and ran, chasing the people fleeing toward Fengdu, opening its vast mouth in delight to swallow them.
Though it had been affected by the realm of the living dead and now possessed flesh and blood, its mind remained a simple one. After all, it was only a box that Shen Mu had awakened.
And the dead it pursued were frightened out of their wits, running for dear life.
The Taotie is the most notorious of the great ferocious beasts in the Barren Ruins; it eats anything, never choosy — small wonder they fled in every direction in terror.
Shen Mu hesitated a moment, then called out, and the Taotie came running back, casting one last reluctant glance at the dead who fled for their lives; then it looked at Long Qilin and brightened again, opening its inconceivably enormous mouth.
Long Qilin shuddered with cold. "You are not to eat me!" he cried. "I treat you as a good brother, and you mean to eat me — is there no justice in heaven or earth?"
Shen Mu soothed him: "Don't worry, it doesn't want to eat you. It just likes to collect bones, and severed hands and feet... Spit it out, spit it out this instant! Damned box, stinking box, you swallowed me up along with everything else! Spit it out..."
...
At last they came to the first divine city of Fengdu. Here Shen Mu saw every manner of strange passerby: some had no heads, some had a great hole split in their foreheads, others were missing an arm or a leg.
There were also, however, mighty ones who had died ordinary deaths, whole in hand and foot.
The first divine city was crowded, and strange beings drifted in the air as well — not dead men, but something like spirits.
"Those are mighty ones whose souls were scattered. Their remnant souls wander here; even in Fengdu they have no bodies."