Chapter 1192 — The Eerie Black Peak
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 3
On the eleventh day, they witnessed a sight that made their blood run cold. Great mushrooms had grown from the void beasts' bones—many great mushrooms sprouting from the beasts' mouths, enormous things, each capped with a human face, the features twisted, the mouth stretched as though roaring. Long Qilin was timid by nature and feared this above all things; he was scared out of his wits.
Fortunately, the mushrooms soon withered; when the sun rose the next day, they turned into pools of black, flocculent matter.
Now, from all across the hundred thousand great mountains of Blackwood came the sound of bones collapsing—the noise of the void beasts' skeletons rotting and caving in. Long Qilin and Yan'er had thought they could rest easy for a few days, but that very night the strange happenings began again.
A great earthquake, unprecedented in the Ancestral Court, erupted. Its intensity was beyond anything Long Qilin and Yan'er had ever encountered.
Countless divine mountains in the Ancestral Court toppled, the earth split open, mountain ranges became gorges, and the seas dried up, exposing their beds.
Yet here at the Great Blackwood, it was unexpectedly calm; they heard only the howling of wild wind outside. Stepping out of the palace, they saw that beyond the Great Blackwood, thunder and rain raged together, meteors hurtled wildly, and earth and sky collapsed in swaths as though rupturing—it was nothing short of the end of the world. When all had subsided and dawn broke the next day, the Ancestral Court was still the Ancestral Court, without the slightest change.
But when night came again, the ground still shook and the mountains still swayed, all manner of strange things occurred, the sky fell and the earth split—once more like the destruction of the world. Yet when day came, the Ancestral Court was as it had been before, unchanged. Long Qilin stood outside the hall.
The east was turning pale; the eerie phenomena of the night before had vanished once more, and the void beasts' bones had disappeared entirely.
He looked into the distance and suddenly froze. The summit of one black peak among the Great Blackwood mountains had been split apart by the quake.
Yan'er and little Tubo also mustered their courage and came out.
Clouds gathered beneath Long Qilin's feet, and he flew toward that mountain. Upon it he found five deep marks, as though an incomparably vast hand had reached out from inside the mountain, seized the black peak, and then been dragged back into the mountain's body, leaving behind five claw marks where its nails had gouged.
Yan'er came up with little Tubo in tow.
Studying those five gouges—gorges in their own right—she could not help but shiver, and said, "What manner of thing made these? " Long Qilin shook his head. "I do not know. But if we stay here tonight and watch, we will find out what it is.
" Just then, an aged voice came to them. "If you wait until tonight, that crawling thing will have eaten all three of you.
"