Chapter 791 — Antecedents and Roots
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
Suddenly a thick shadow flashed through the fog again, and when it had passed, the sea was utterly empty—those hundred-odd god and demon experts had vanished into thin air!
Shen Mu shivered. Among those gods and demons had been several deities, and they too had vanished in an instant!
He hastily ordered the Heavenly Worthy of Imperial Heaven to stay close, and had the dragon and water qilins follow the donkey.
Again the hee-hee-hee of laughter came, ringing all around them, and the fog grew thicker still.
Divine light rippled in Shen Mu's eyes and became a River of Stars Sevenfold Heaven. As he gazed about, a face suddenly appeared before them.
The dragon qilin feared this above all things and nearly cried out; then one face after another surfaced in the fog, forming a great ring around them.
Those faces were the very gods and demons from before!
The faces of those god and demon experts whirled around them with a huffing sound, their smiles growing ever stranger, strange laughter coming from every direction.
Suddenly behind Shen Mu a dark, sunken doorway emerged. The doorway yawned wide, and the faces passed through it one after another—yet still they danced around them.
Shen Mu's heart sank. "They are corpses, not living men," he said in a low voice.
His Heaven-Bearing Gate could draw in the souls or primordial spirits of the living, yet these faces passed through the Heaven-Bearing Gate and came out unharmed—which meant they had no souls at all!
The scholar glanced at the Heaven-Bearing Gate behind him and said in surprise: "This gate of yours seems exceedingly profound."
He brought out a qin and plucked it twice at random. A muffled grunt came from the thick fog; the faces twisted and stopped spinning. Then a light of unbearable brilliance blazed in the fog, like two little suns born within the mist, sending out blinding radiance.
"Heh—so there is an expert here!" A stench of rot and brine came from near the two little suns.
The scholar hooked three strings and let them go with a sudden flick. The qin music swelled; three notes fused into a single line, and the two little suns went out one after the other. The splash of something heavy striking water followed, thud after thud.
The fog around them thinned by degrees, and everyone's sight grew clear.
Shen Mu and the Heavenly Worthy of Imperial Heaven looked about and saw a huge tentacle floating on the water, studded with suckers each more than a zhang across, and on those suckers hung gods and demons, one after another!
Those gods and demons were gasping for breath, yet their faces showed that they could not breathe. They wailed, their features shriveling at a speed visible to the eye, their flesh growing thinner and thinner, until at last they became shriveled skins!
The scholar on the donkey's back stuffed the qin away somewhere, poked at his radish, and the donkey chased the radish onward.
Shen Mu hurried after him. When they came to the place where the light had gone out, they saw floating on the sea a round head the size of a hundred-li island. Its skullcap had been blown off, and on that bald, enormous head the two eyes had been slit open by something sharp!
All across the surrounding sea lay the corpses of gods and demons, hanging from one immense tentacle after another, nothing left of them but skins.
Shen Mu and the others passed this colossal thing and looked up: they had come to the shore.
Ahead stood a divine mountain, two strands of baleful aura tangled at its summit.
Shen Mu looked back. The monster was slowly sinking into the sea, vanishing from sight.
"This demigod was exceedingly powerful, yet you killed him with a few plucks of your strings," Shen Mu said. "Your qin music has entered the Dao. Where does your qin rank in the world?"