Chapter 963 — Blood Falls Like Rain in the Cold Night
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Out in the darkness beyond the city, bellowing roars shook the ear, growing louder and louder, and out of that darkness walked monsters of mountainous bulk.
Panic seized the people within the city. These were monsters that seemed to have stepped out of a nightmare, the ugliest and most vicious things fantasy could devise: some were like men overgrown with tentacles, some had eyes crawling all over their bodies, some were like flowers of flesh and blood, some like plant and human fused into one—a thousand shapes, ten thousand strangenesses. Yet those that came after them were ancient gods with birds' heads and human bodies, ox heads and human bodies, beast heads and human bodies, along with colossal dread dragons, many-headed serpents, and pot-bellied giants.
There were also things like bizarre, grotesquely altered creatures: giants whose arms were sharpened drills, and others whose bodies sprouted keen blades and swords all over, walking siege engines.
Toot-toot— A great ship wrought of flesh and blood came puffing thick smoke, its hull covered in long arms, its underside swarming with numberless legs and feet, and upon it crowded people with only half a body, beating gongs and drums, blowing, plucking, singing, playing.
The ship of flesh and blood danced to the music; at its bow a vast bloody maw opened, its fangs like row upon row of steel blades, opening and closing, as it came joyfully toward the city of the Creators.
The moon rose in the sky, and moonlight spilled down. Strange laughter came from on high; Shen Mu looked up and saw that the moon had grown a human face, and from it issued eerie laughter.
More than that, the moon had grown arms too, and from somewhere it produced a flute—a flute polished from a Creator's leg bone—which the face in the moon set to its lips and played a merry tune! Shen Mu withdrew his gaze.
The night of this Taixu land was like some uncanny dream, filling a person with a sense of the absurd and the strange.
Whoosh—a titanic thing dropped from the sky onto the gate tower: a great bird covered in human faces, its wings composed of white bone, which crushed half the gate tower down.
The faces on the bird stared up in fevered excitement at the handful of people left in the city, and those faces gave out strange and uncanny laughter. The bones that made up the bird's wings were hollow; suddenly all the bones together spouted streams of air and flame, and from within the bones came sharp, ear-splitting whistles; the air and fire propelled the monstrous bird aloft, up into the sky!
Amid the shrieking, the nightmare monsters outside the city set their feet in motion, rumbling toward the city of the Creators!
"Heavens.
.
.
" A female true deity shuddered, staring blankly at the sight. "What kind of world is this?
" This was the world the Taixu Creators had made.
This world was composed of divine consciousness; the Creators had visualized the whole world with their divine consciousness, creating all things, creating civilization.
Yet because invaders from beyond had breached one of those worlds, inner demons had bred throughout Taixu.
Though the Taixu land remained intact, there was no Youdu here, no place where the dead returned—and that led to another consequence.
The dead had nowhere to go and could only wander Taixu, where they merged with the divine consciousness of those Creators, and so were born living beings unlike any life in the world. Nor were the dead Creators alone in forming such Taixu monsters; the gods and demons of the Heavenly Court who had perished in Taixu did so as well.
Boom!
A violent tremor ran through the ground; outside the city the Taixu monsters slammed into the wall, and the seemingly indestructible wall of the Creators' city shook with a crash, cracks appearing one after another, shocking to behold.
But the city was made from the Creators' divine consciousness, and the cracks quickly healed themselves, to the relief of everyone within.