Chapter 107 — The Demon Formation

Mount Huqi.

The seat of the Nether King Sect's main hall.

Beneath the desolate mountain, the Nether King Sect's main hall lay hidden within hard rock caverns. In a winding, twisting tunnel, in some deep and silent place, the long passage was utterly empty of people; only on the stone walls to either side, every few dozen feet, a bronze lamp was set, casting light upon a small patch of ground.

You Si, her face veiled in black gauze, drifted forward alone, her figure elusive as a shadow; from afar she looked like a ghost wandering through the dark.

This place was already forbidden ground within the Nether King Sect, as mysterious as the Ice Cave where Bi Li dwelt, and ordinary disciples had always been strictly barred from entering. But You Si, as the Vermilion Bird, one of the Nether King Sect's Four Holy Envoys, was among its core members, and so she alone could come and go freely in such places.

Yet as she cast a glance down the deep tunnel stretching out before her, faint and endless, her steps suddenly slowed, and she seemed to hesitate for a moment; but at last she walked on.

From the depths of the shadows ahead, a few strange, low growls seemed to sound, like the roars of some wild beast.

After another long stretch of tunnel, the lamps on either side grew dimmer and dimmer, until at last, turning a corner, You Si came to the end of the passage, where a stone door stood, and above its lintel three characters were carved:

The Dragon Prison.

You Si stared at those three characters for a long while. All around was silence, save for the strange growls that had been sounding since before, which now grew gradually clearer, and the air seemed to be filled with a faint smell of blood.

The black gauze over her face stirred; she seemed to shake her head and sigh softly, then stepped through the stone door.

The moment she entered the stone door, the space opened out; within was a vast stone cavern, its side walls jutting with strangely shaped rocks of every form. And before the stone door where You Si stood ran a narrow stone path suspended in midair, winding forward to the center of the cavern. At this moment she found herself, remarkably, in the middle of the air within this enormous cavern.

Clearly this was not her first time here; at such a sight she showed no surprise, only stood silent a moment before walking forward along the narrow stone path. The upper half of the cavern was dark, but just beneath the path a red glow flickered faintly, reflecting upward, and instead made the rock walls above the cavern look grotesque and menacing.

The smell of blood in the air grew stronger still.

Whether this suspended stone path in the great cavern was a work of nature or of human hands, it hung there across the void, and from afar there was not a single supporting pillar beneath it—altogether inconceivable.

You Si's black figure walked along the stone path without so much as a footfall; she did indeed have a ghostly, forbidding air. But she had not gone far before she saw the figure ahead.

The Nether King.

At the end of the stone path was a stone platform some seven feet square. There the Nether King now stood, hands clasped behind his back. Seen from behind, his figure was steady and massive, and he seemed strangely to blend into the great cavern itself.

You Si came up behind him and said softly, "Sect Master."

The Nether King turned his head and nodded, smiling. "You've come."

The black gauze on You Si's face gave a sudden twitch, as though she were startled. The stone path ended at this platform; beyond it all was empty space, and correspondingly, the mysterious red light below the cavern now shone far brighter from where she stood. As the Nether King turned his head, the red glow swept from him, dimly illuminating his features and blurring them somewhat; even in his eyes there seemed a faint red gleam.

The Nether King appeared not to notice, only saying, "Come here."

You Si stepped forward and stood upon the platform. Suddenly all before her was bright: with no stone path to block her view, everything at the bottom of the cavern lay bare.

Beneath the cavern was, astonishingly, a great pool of blood; fresh crimson blood filled the bottom of the vast cavern, and how the Nether King Sect had come by so much fresh blood was beyond guessing. The thick smell of blood in the air must surely rise from below.

Steeped in the blood pool were two gigantic beasts: one was the Yellow Bird of the Death Marsh, the other the Kui Ox, the marvelous beast of Liubo Mountain in the Eastern Sea. Most of the bodies of these two ancient beasts were soaked in the bloody water, and at the same time a dark red beam of light shone down upon each from above the pool. The source of that dark red radiance was the Coiling Dragon Cauldron, hanging alone in midair, suspended there by some nameless force.

The Coiling Dragon Cauldron was positioned quite far from where the Nether King and You Si stood, but You Si could still make out a black silhouette upon it working a spell, though it was blurred by the red glow. Even so, she knew who it was: Mr. Ghost, the most mysterious figure in the Demonic Sect's Nether King Sect.

You Si was one of the previous generation's Four Holy Envoys of the Nether King Sect, and knew nearly every matter of the sect, great and small; only this Mr. Ghost was the exception. The reason was simple: this man had not originally been of the Nether King Sect. He was a mysterious figure who had appeared suddenly at the side of the present Nether King after his accession. The Nether King held him in the highest respect, and on the rare few occasions when this mysterious man had acted, the uncanny arts he displayed had moved even Azure Dragon, You Si, and other masters of the Nether King Sect.

Yet in You Si's heart there remained a deep wariness of the man, chiefly because it was under Mr. Ghost's vigorous urging that the Nether King had finally, ten years ago, begun to set in motion the "Four Spirits Blood Formation."

The Coiling Dragon Cauldron, the Sect's treasured heirloom passed down through the Nether King Sect's generations, was of unfathomable origin, containing endless spiritual power, neither righteous nor evil, uncanny in the extreme. Upon its body, besides the ancient and artless patterns, were carved many mysterious inscriptions that every past Sect Master had failed to decipher. But in this present generation, the Nether King, whose mind embraced all things and who was truly a rare genius of his age, happened also to have at his side a Mr. Ghost who seemed to have made a special study of these mysterious writings; and the two working together had, astonishingly, deciphered them.

It turned out that the inscriptions on the Coiling Dragon Cauldron recorded a strange formation called the "Four Spirits Blood Formation," which required the spiritual power of four marvelous beasts from the primal ages of antiquity to draw out the Cauldron's own uncanny magic, forming thereby a peerless and matchless formation. According to the ancient cauldron's inscriptions, once the Four Spirits Blood Formation was complete, its power would be enough to destroy heaven and earth.

The Nether King was a bold and ambitious colossus of his age; naturally he would not overlook such power. And in the great battle at Qingyun ten years before, the Canglan Sect's Immortal-Slaying Sword Formation had shaken the world and swept all before it, beyond the power of any mortal to withstand. The Nether King had pondered deeply, and concluded that only this Four Spirits Blood Formation might hold the chance of defeating the Immortal-Slaying Sword Formation.

From that time on, all the Nether King Sect's actions had begun to revolve around the Four Spirits Blood Formation.