Chapter 615 — The God-Slaying Blade
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
He had become a three-headed, six-armed dried corpse, skin stretched over bone, utterly dreadful—yet in the eyes of the head at the front of his body, a glimmer of light moved within the pupils. Chixi carefully divided off a portion of the blood in his eyes, using that little blood to activate part of his body's functions, and rose shakily to his feet.
His other two heads hung low; his six arms drooped helplessly. The blood in his eyes was too little; it could sustain only the smallest measure of his body's functions.
The rest would have to lie dormant for now. He dragged himself toward the temple door, taking a long while to reach the stone steps, and then his legs gave way and he went rolling and tumbling down the Divine Mountain.
Rolling was slower, after all, than the running of Shen Mu, Zhe Huali, and the others; this descent took him the better part of a shichen to get from the peak to the foot. Chixi rested for a long time before climbing up again, and dragged himself about in search of water.
Shen Mu, at a lake in the distance, was poisoning the water with whole bags of Blood-Dissolving Powder when he caught sight of Chixi staggering toward him.
He cast the powder into the lake in a panic and drove his divine ability, and above the lake a mass of cloud formed; from the cloud a divine dragon descended, its tail plunging into the lake and churning it violently.
Shen Mu waved a hand and sprinted off. Hiss—two beams of divine light shot from Chixi's eyes, but they missed him.
He could only watch Shen Mu flee into the distance. "Water—" Rage struck Chixi to the heart; his body could no longer hold itself up, and he pitched forward to the ground.
A mountain in sight can run a horse to death; a lakeshore can walk an ox to death.
He had barely dragged himself this far, and now the lake was poisoned. To reach another source of water would take a month or two—or, if luck ran against him, a year or two. Just then, thunder rolled across the sky.
The rumbling shock woke Chixi.
He turned himself over with difficulty, raised his face to heaven, and opened the mouths of all three heads, waiting joyfully for rain.
The sky filled with dense clouds, lightning and thunder crossing, the dark clouds growing heavier and lower.
On a distant mountain, fiery dragons suddenly rose, one after another, charging into the cloud bank and scattering the rain.
In moments the sky cleared completely, a pure blue, and the black clouds drifted past as white clouds. Chixi turned his head with difficulty, and two beams of divine light shot from his eyes, blasting two great holes in that distant peak. "If I find you.
. .
"
On the other side, Shen Mu, having scattered the rain from the sky, came down the mountain at once.
The peak behind him had been struck down for no reason, two huge gaps blown through its crown. He had recovered a great deal, but his body was still not back at its peak.
"Now there will be no rain for a little while.
I should be safe for a time—rest and tend to myself, and study what this little box is really for.
" He transformed into a black shadow hugging the ground, concealing his tracks, going far from this place, taking every care to leave behind not a single trace; even if rain came later and woke Chixi, the creature still could not find his hiding place anytime soon. After a long while, Shen Mu released himself from the shadow state, showing his form, and took up the little box to study it.
The little box was the center of the God-Slaying Platform.
Its surface was stamped with all manner of patterns and veins, extremely archaic in style—rune imprints of the Chiming Era, he supposed, vastly different from the rune imprints of today. The dharma arts and divine abilities of the Chiming Era must have been different from those of the present as well.