Chapter 862 — Reunion with an Old Acquaintance in the Coffin
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
Shen Mu looked at the coffin. It hung upright in the air, never touching the ground, and the glow that filled the air around it drifted and wavered about the coffin and the stone well, profoundly still. Everything here seemed frozen; no other sound could be heard. The lacquer-black coffin hung there, facing the mouth of the well. The glow poured from the well itself, faint and thin.
Puzzled, Shen Mu said, "Xing An, the coffin has not been opened. So where did you pick up the token?"
The coffin was bound in chains and had never been opened, and apart from the black coffin and the well there was nothing else in this valley. This perplexed him.
Xing An set down his case, and it opened with a click.
"The token was placed on top of the coffin."
Xing An worked some art or other, and one after another the demigod bodies inside the case leapt out on their own. The case grew restless, clicking and hopping about, as though trying to swallow these divine beings back inside. After a moment, a hundred-odd divine beings stood around Shen Mu. They had no breath, no aura; Xing An had already refined them to death.
Xing An raised his hands in a sword-finger gesture and moved like a ghost, tapping each demigod between the brows. Then he stood still.
"Open!"
The space between his brows split open with a crack, revealing a dark, sunken eye. The eye rolled once all the way around, and strands of black thread shot from it, drifting through the air like smoke, boring into the brows of the demigods.
"Youdu arts," Shen Mu said in surprise.
Xing An's vertical brow-eye was somewhat like his own third eye; both were used to command the power of Youdu. But Xing An's eye was still rudimentary, far less exquisite than Shen Mu's third eye. And yet there was one thing about Xing An's Youdu abilities that made the eyes light up.
"Hierarch, he is imitating you," the Dragon Qilin whispered.
Shen Mu showed nothing on his face. "Don't talk nonsense."
Even so, he grew wary. Xing An's vertical brow-eye was indeed imitating his, which meant Xing An placed tremendous value on Shen Mu's fleshly body. Given Xing An's temperament, whatever he took a fancy to he would surely obtain! What alarmed him more was that the demigods leaping from Xing An's case were all extraordinarily powerful, beings in the True God realm, no less. To have captured and refined them to death showed how terrifying Xing An's strength truly was.
When Xing An finished his ritual, one demigod suddenly opened an enormous bloody maw and swallowed the demigod before it in a single gulp! Shen Mu's heart lurched, and then another demigod devoured that one, and then one behind it swallowed that one, and in the blink of an eye, of the hundred-odd demigods only one remained! It was like the big fish eating the small, which in turn were eaten by even bigger fish.
The sole remaining demigod leapt up and sprinted down from the mountaintop, straight for the ancient well beneath the hanging coffin. As it ran, flesh and blood kept falling from its body. It barely made it halfway down the slope before the might in the glow reduced it to a running skeleton of white bone. Just then the bones burst apart, and another demigod charged out from the shattered skeleton, rushing on, and soon it too was turned to bone in the glow. The bones burst again, a third demigod charged out, then a fourth, a fifth... These demigods emerged one after another from the bones, racing toward the ancient well like runners in a relay. Xing An's face showed agitated urgency as he counted under his breath. When he reached one hundred and seven, the last demigod reached the well's edge and was instantly reduced to white bone in the thick glow. That bone demigod leapt, and dropped into the well.
A soft thud echoed from within the well.
Xing An let out a breath. He picked up his case and said, "The next sword bridge is about to appear. Stay close behind me! Now, jump!"