Chapter 516 — The Girl in the Shadows
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Shen Mu drew his head back and looked around. Had he not broken the rules of the Waste, had the strange beasts in the ruins not pressed him so hard, he would never have plunged so rashly into the darkness.
He had never once imagined that a day would come when he too would step into the darkness; to step into it himself was a feeling utterly unlike sheltering under the protection of a stone statue or a box.
He felt as though he had melted into the darkness, like a fish in water, blending as water blends with milk: he was himself a part of the darkness.
To his eyes, the darkness was no longer mere darkness; it was like mist, hazy and indistinct.
"This is not true darkness, but a strange kind of substance."
Shen Mu was astonished. He had always been intensely curious about the darkness of the Waste, yet the insufficiency of his cultivation had barred him from entering it. And even with strength enough to enter, one likely could not discover its secrets, for godlike powers such as Lizheng and Xing'an drove the darkness back and would not let it come near.
To drive the darkness back is to make it very hard to discover the truth of the darkness.
Shen Mu, by contrast, had merged with the darkness, and so found it far easier to discover what the darkness truly was.
Lizheng had once conjectured that the darkness of the Waste was not true darkness but another world overlapping with the Waste; this he called a dark realm.
Later, Lizheng discovered that there was not merely one dark realm in the Waste, but many.
He counted Youdu among the dark realms as well.
Yet as Shen Mu came to understand Youdu, he uncovered another secret: Youdu could indeed be called a dark realm, but it was surely only a corner of the dark realm to which it belonged, and the world in which Youdu lay was the Dark Capital.
The Dark Capital was one of the dark realms within the Waste.
Both the Dark Capital and Youdu were in motion, constantly shifting position, and did not wholly cover the Waste. What covered the Waste entirely must be another dark realm.
Now, having stepped into the darkness, Shen Mu had discovered another truth about the darkness of the Waste: the darkness was a strange and wondrous substance.
"I entered another world from the cliff of the Waste, and found that in that world day and night are exactly reversed from day and night in the Waste. And so I made a bold conjecture."
Shen Mu's eyes flickered as he recalled what he had seen and surmised in the golden desert.
That world was the Waste of the Shanghuang era, a golden desert, where he had fled to escape Xing'an.
The desert too had its night and day, but they were exactly opposite to the night and day of the Waste.
So Shen Mu conjectured that the darkness poured in from the Waste of the Shanghuang era: when the sun set, the darkness flowed through the rifts from the Shanghuang Waste into the Kaihuang Waste; the Shanghuang Waste turned to day, the Kaihuang Waste to darkness; and when the sun rose, the darkness flowed back through the rifts into the Shanghuang Waste.
The two Wastes formed an hourglass, and the darkness was the sand within it, flowing back and forth.
Such was his conjecture.
But at the time he had been hunted by Xing'an, and only Ban Gongcuo had been nearby, so he had not spoken this conjecture aloud.
Now, standing within the darkness, he found that it was like some strange substance, which confirmed his conjecture.
"If the rifts in the cliff that cuts across north and south were sealed, could the darkness be dammed up in the Shanghuang Waste, so that from then on the Kaihuang Waste would suffer no more invasions of darkness?"
Shen Mu blinked. The method seemed feasible, though whether it could succeed, there was no telling.
Besides, the cliff was so long, the rifts so many, and more than one world lay beyond them; how to seal them was the greatest problem of all.