Chapter 1083 — Darkness Is About to Descend
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
The man's voice was gentle. "We are husband and wife, after all..."
Better he had not spoken of it. At the mere mention, wrath surged up in the woman. She turned, fetched a tray from the palace, and on it lay a hundred-odd silver needles.
She pinched up a needle, gave it a light shake, and it grew to the length of a foot. One after another she drove them into his body.
The man screamed in agony, a wailing hideous to hear.
Just then, the woman sensed something. She looked quickly up at the sky. The man bound to the pillar grew agitated too, and said urgently, "You felt it as well? This surging dark power — it comes from Tubo! They have found Tubo already! Husband and wife together, we can be rid of this natural enemy—"
At these words, hatred rose in the woman's heart. She snatched up her whip and lashed him madly until his whole body was striped with wounds.
Screaming in pain, the man on the pillar laughed. "So long as you are at my side, beat me ten times harder and I am still glad!"
The woman put away her whip and looked up toward where the darkness churned. She sneered, "To take Tubo unawares is no easy thing. Your true body must come. Where is it? Why have you still not shown yourself?"
The man looked at her tenderly. "My true body has been here all along, silently watching you, watching the way you look. Watching the way you beat me — even if I watched another hundred thousand years, a million years, I would never tire of it..."
The woman thrashed him savagely again. "Get out here!"
This time Yue Tianzun and Ling Tianzun sensed the dark ripple as well. The darkness came not from nearby, but from the heavens above their heads.
The Yuan Realm holds ten thousand heavens and worlds, hanging at the rim of the sky. For the later-born races, whence these heavens came and why they hang over the Yuan Realm is a mystery.
They know only that the heavens hang there.
When Yun Tianzun returned from his wanderings abroad, he had once let slip that these heavens might be worlds created by some prehistoric race — though he did not elaborate.
Suddenly the earth convulsed violently, and countless strands of dark demonic qi gushed up from underground. The people of the borderland fell into chaos, scattering in every direction as though the sky itself were caving in.
Startled, Ling Tianzun and Yue Tianzun looked up. That heaven in the sky was like an enormous demonic eye, and the demonic qi spilling from its rim resembled numberless writhing tentacles.
The demonic qi welling from the riven earth of the Yuan Realm was flying toward that heaven. But the two of them quickly sensed that this qi came not from underground, but from another space and time.
Youdu!
"Something momentous has happened in Youdu!" both thought at once.
Now the dark demonic qi grew thicker and thicker. Yue Tianzun rose hastily into the air and cried urgently, "Move the people here away, quickly!"
Beams of light streaked across the sky one after another, all flying toward that heaven — those were demigods of extraordinary power!
On the Heavenly River, Shen Mu urged them on without cease. The dragon chariot flew faster and faster, racing straight for the Heavenly Court, when suddenly he saw the stars in the sky blaze brilliantly bright, blotting out the radiance of the sun.
Something stirred in Shen Mu's heart. Those were ancient gods hauling their ancestral stars, flying in from a distant space and time!
At that same moment, he saw several great tower ships and mighty vessels dragging a colossal object past the Heavenly River, flying toward one of the heavens of the Yuan Realm.
He was already far from that heaven now; seen from such a distance it was no more than a black line.
And the colossal thing those ships dragged was a vast divine platform, with two enormous baleful auras coiling around each other like serpents, churning without cease, reaching to the very summit of the sky!
"Sacrifice, my people!"