Chapter 604 — A Kindness Received Must Be Repaid
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
So dreadful was this place that even space had grown wildly unstable. Shattered space formed long, narrow rifts across sky and earth, like mirrors of no thickness at all, refracting scenes both near and far.
Some of these rifts stretched on beyond sight; others were a scant two or three feet long. Having no thickness, they were hard to spot, and every step had to be taken with care.
One careless stride across a spatial rift, and a man might well be sliced cleanly in two!
Space was so keen that a man would likely not learn he was dead until he had already been cut apart.
As Shen Mu and Granny Zhu struggled against the towering waves, they even saw a wave ten thousand fathoms high sliced in two by a terrifying spatial rift!
Stars glittered before and behind Granny Zhu, forming the Great Luotian star-force field. By this field she sensed the perils around them, and by it she could also fend off the calamities of Luofu Heaven.
Granny Zhu was already a being advancing upon the divine realm; perilous though Luofu Heaven was, it was not yet enough to threaten her life.
Shen Mu looked about and saw countless wronged souls drifting to and fro across that hellish place, the spirits of demon race folk who had died in Luofu Heaven, and his appetite stirred in spite of himself.
He hastily suppressed his craving to devour those souls, and a chill of fear ran through him. "What kind of monster has this eye made of me..."
Just then they saw, at the heart of the storm ahead, the enormous skeleton of a demon god sprawled upon the waste. However fierce the storm, it could not stir that skeleton a hairsbreadth.
They came nearer. Even sprawled on the ground, the skeleton stood several dozen yards tall. It had wings, and the wings too were bone; its four hooves were like great ox hooves, but of shining gold.
More than that, Shen Mu saw within the demon god's skeleton a host of glowing treasuries floating, each holding sun, moon, and stars, and a stretch of land.
The treasuries were already broken, their continents drowned beneath the waters.
Shen Mu and Granny Zhu entered through a breach in the treasury, and saw that the waters had already flooded over its land, and that the sun, moon, and stars in its sky were shattered and dim.
Stranger still, upon that land there were cities and dwellings, and many houses lay drowned beneath the water.
"This was once a dwelling place of the demon race. It looks to have been destroyed only a few hundred years ago."
Granny Zhu was astonished, and mused, "Could it be that after the calamity befell Luofu Heaven, certain demon gods willingly gave up their bodies, so that demon race folk might live on within their treasuries?"
Shen Mu swept the third eye around him, and far away, above a ruined river of stars, he saw a demon god's palace, battered and half in ruins.
Within this demon god's divine-bridge treasury, a flying bridge linked it to the palace.
He glimpsed within the palace a soul, faint and insubstantial, standing there all alone, and it seemed to him utterly desolate.
He felt an urge to fly over and devour that desolate soul, yet within him there was no hunger now, only reverence.
Of this demon god, only the soul remained.
He had given up his treasury for his own folk to dwell in, that their lives might be preserved; yet his flesh could not withstand the cataclysm of heaven and earth, and his body died.
His folk might have lived on within his treasury for a long while, but in the end the treasury too was shattered by the disaster.
"He spent all his primal spirit, leaving only his soul unextinguished. And yet his folk died all the same. His soul has stood here a few hundred years, I think..."