Chapter 98 — The Giant Tree

Because of Biluo, the Underworld King had treated him almost as his own son, pouring out his heart in instruction; under his deliberate cultivation, the Ming Li of today was no longer the ignorant young disciple of Canglan of former days—not in his cultivation of the Dao, nor in his knowledge and experience.

As he now observed the giant trees of the forest, he saw that in truth they were not all rare and unheard-of species; among them were oaks, maples, locusts, and the like, which grew plentifully in any ordinary mountain outside the Dead Marsh. What was strange was that the trees here were all extraordinarily huge—ordinarily, one half their size would already be astonishing, let alone so many gathered together.

Stranger still, the places where these giants grew ought to have been brimming with life, yet beneath this dense fog not a single animal was to be seen, and even the brambles and brush that had occasionally appeared when he first entered were all gone. Even on the ground, apart from the giant roots that occasionally broke the surface, there was only hard, faintly yellow earth—not so much as a blade of grass.

Beneath the cold fog lay a killing stillness.

Ming Li frowned deeply and brooded for a long while, looking all around. The giant trees towered to the heavens, straight and high, and as he strolled among them he felt as though he had fallen into an enormous labyrinth.

Suddenly he flicked his sleeve, and his whole body rose into the air. Unwilling to linger in this eerie place, he summoned the Soul Devourer and flew forward amid a dark blue radiance.

His speed was naturally much greater now, but mindful that the wondrous treasure might lie close at hand, Ming Li did not fly above the treetops. Instead he kept merely six feet above the ground, flying swiftly while carefully searching the earth below.

Time slipped quietly by; the woods remained utterly still, and only the sound of his passage echoed among the trees. As Ming Li pressed deeper, the trunks grew larger and larger, until most of those that met his eyes were ancient trees so incredibly thick that six or seven sturdy men could not have encircled them. No need to guess—these trees must have lived for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years!

Amid an atmosphere grown ever more thickly strange, Ming Li's figure suddenly came to a halt.

By now it had been light for some time, yet the mist here showed no sign of dispersing at all, as though since the beginning of time these layered fogs had coexisted with this forest.

There, in the deepest part of the forest, Ming Li stood suspended in midair, gazing ahead.

Before him, sheer and towering, stood a wall!

A wall of wood!

Rough-grained wood, hard and faintly cracked, thrust suddenly out of the depths of the mist: a wooden wall three yards high, as strong and sinewy as a coiled dragon, barring the way through the giant trees, its base driven deep into the soil.

Ming Li watched coldly, motionless, studying this wooden wall in minute detail, the corners of his eyes beginning to twitch. Then slowly he shifted his body closer and lightly touched it with his hand.

At the touch came a mild, rough sensation, and something stirred faintly in Ming Li's mind—but he dared not believe it. He withdrew his hand and drifted slowly forward along the wall.

The white mist parted before him and slowly closed again behind him; the wall ahead grew taller and thicker, gradually taking on a rounded shape as its height crept upward.

At last, when it had reached nearly six yards, he came to the end of this wooden wall, and Ming Li's body halted.

He drew a deep breath, yet still could not calm his mind; amid an irrepressible pounding of his heart, everything before him, piercing through the mist, finally revealed itself.

This enormous wooden wall, at the end of the fog, blended harmoniously into something even more vast.

Suddenly a shaft of sunlight pierced down through the mist from the sky, then vanished again, hidden by the fog.

Ming Li at last confirmed the incredible conjecture in his heart.

That enormous wooden wall was a length of tree root...

The mist lay in layer upon layer, drifting and uncertain. He was breathing raggedly with sheer astonishment; then he jerked his head up, and his gaze, like light piercing the fog, went coursing upward, straight toward the sky.

Like a soundless flash of lightning, a thunderclap that made the whole forest tremble—what appeared before him was a giant tree utterly beyond imagination, its trunk so colossal within the fog that no edge could be seen. Wrapped in rough bark, the trunk rose like a vast mountain, sheer and towering, plunging straight up into the mist as though boring into the clouds!

Ming Li was like a mere ant, insignificant before this giant tree.

A tree whose very roots reached six yards high—what must the tree itself be like?

Ming Li slowly withdrew his gaze. On his shoulder Little Grey gave a low cry, seemingly uneasy as well. Ming Li tilted his head slightly, then suddenly smiled and said mildly, "The world is vast, and nothing is too strange for it. We truly have been frogs at the bottom of a well. Little Grey, let's go! Let us take a good look at this tree!"

Beneath his feet, the dark blue radiance of the Soul Devourer suddenly blazed brighter. A moment later, half soaring upward, Ming Li gave a soft whistle, and with the rushing of air, man and monkey shot straight up into the sky, vanishing into the layered fog.

A fierce wind struck his face, sharpened by the sheer speed. Here in the mist it felt rather like that time they had first entered the inner marsh, within the wall of miasma—though after all it was different: for one thing there was no poison in the air, and for another he could see farther. Yet this layered fog actually gathered at an extraordinary height; Ming Li had been flying upward along this inconceivable giant tree for nearly half an hour, and still the mist had not thinned. He began to wonder whether it might not simply join with the clouds of the sky above.

At the same time, Ming Li noticed that the trunk of the giant tree before him was gradually changing. At ground level, naturally, it was the base of the tree, unimaginably thick; and upon the trunk itself there was nothing but rough bark besides.

But after flying so long, branches had begun to appear upon this giant tree. Most striking were the strange plants that had begun to show themselves, twining about the trunk like vines, crisscrossing in every direction, with huge leaves, and at the tips of the branches blooms of every color—red and yellow, orange and purple—lovely beyond words, and borne on the wind came what seemed a faint fragrance.

Yet even now he still could not fully make out just how thick the trunk of this giant tree was.

The marvels of creation were truly beyond fathoming. This wondrous tree before him must surely be a million years old, to be so enormous!

"Hiss!"

A shrill whistle of air, a flash of dark blue radiance, and he burst out from the mist. The fog beneath his feet drifted up a little with his passing, then settled gently down again, like a wave softly subsiding.

Ming Li had finally broken free of the mist!

Heaven and earth opened out before him, vast and clear!

The sky was blue, cloudless across ten thousand miles, washed clean as a mirror, while below the white fog stretched boundless, wreathing the giant tree before him—and the closer to the tree, the thicker the fog.

By now Ming Li was high in the air, and at last he could see this giant tree clearly.

Even at such a height, the trunk of the giant tree before him was still a full hundred yards thick; and considering the distance he had flown from the ground to here, what stood before him was not a tree at all, but a towering mountain!

And yet it was unmistakably, truly, a tree.