Chapter 109 — The Mystic Fire Altar

Ming Li dumped the dead grey porpoise in a corner and made a careful examination of the burrow it had occupied, and sure enough he found an exceedingly fine thread running out from the hole to a bell some distance away. No doubt his and Jin Pingyue's repeated failures to slip in over the past few days had all been discovered by this tiny grey porpoise.

He had once read of such a creature in *Annals of Gods and Demons*, a fragmentary scroll kept in the secret archives of the Hades Sect: the grey porpoise had a nose of extraordinary keenness, far surpassing any ordinary beast in the world. All these days he had gone to great lengths to conceal himself, never guessing that a small animal like this would be the one to find him out.

Yet though he had worked out this much, Ming Li's brows knit together all the same, and standing in the dark corner by the wall he fell into brooding silence. The grey porpoise was no ancient divine beast, perhaps, but it was rare enough in the world; he had only ever heard of it in a certain forest deep within the Ten Thousand Desolate Mountains of the southern frontier. That the Burning Cloud Valley should harbor such a creature at all was strange—and stranger still, judging by the past few days, when he had tried to enter the valley from many different directions and been discovered without exception, it seemed there were no few of them in the valley. Truly astonishing.

But the crux of the matter was this: to have trained so many of the beasts at once to such a pitch—such wondrous art of beast-taming was unheard of even among the Demon Sect, let alone the orthodox sects of the Central Plains. Yet it was said the barbarian tribes of the southern frontier were well versed in just such strange skills.

Ming Li lifted his head, turned, and looked ahead. Suddenly he saw that beyond a clamor rising in the distance, the depths of the Burning Cloud Valley remained utterly still, wrapped in a heavy darkness like a black curtain, and who could say how many secrets it concealed.

The noise at the valley entrance gradually subsided; from afar he could only hear voices raised in speech, but the sounds of fighting had died away completely. The Burning Cloud Valley's people had evidently brought the situation under control.

Who on earth could be so bold as to openly provoke the Burning Cloud Valley? Ming Li withdrew his gaze from the valley entrance, and Jin Pingyue's figure flitted unbidden through his mind—that mysterious, bewitching woman was probably still in the thick of the chaos.

By now Ming Li had advanced from that hidden corner deep into the interior of the Burning Cloud Valley. Along the way there was no more of the alarm-ringing set off by grey porpoises, and he supposed the valley must have distributed the keen-nosed little beasts at every edge and corner, so that once one reached the middle of the valley there was no longer any need to worry about them.

The night was deep, and the valley, only just calmed from its uproar, seemed especially secluded and still. As Ming Li's ghostlike figure drifted along the halls and paths within the valley, the world beneath that black curtain gradually revealed itself.

The Burning Cloud Valley was acclaimed a pillar of the orthodox way, and though it ordinarily kept a low profile, it was after all a great sect eight hundred years in its prosperity; what appeared little by little along this road was the very depth and substance of the house.

Beneath the night, a dozen or more paths, great and small, wound and linked one to another, branching out like the blood vessels of a body and pushing deep into the darkness at the heart of the valley. Lining the roads were ordinary disciples' dwellings, or tall and imposing halls, and interspersed among these buildings were mostly flowers, grasses, and trees—green bamboo and winter plum, and also bright, stately peonies and herbaceous peonies, clustered in groups and gazing at one another from afar, so fused with the surrounding halls as to have a charm all their own.

Because of the commotion, disciples of the Burning Cloud Valley still passed to and fro despite the late hour, and Ming Li was forced to hide himself with care lest his trail be given away. Yet the faces of these disciples seemed quite calm, without the astonishment and shock of when the uproar first broke out, which told him the situation at the valley entrance was already well in hand.

A handful of Burning Cloud Valley disciples going about their business was naturally no great obstacle to Ming Li. For ten years he had carried within him the true methods of three paths—Buddhist, demonic, and Daoist—taking the strange and wondrous arts of the Heavenly Book as his foundation, and the speed of his advancement had been frankly inconceivable, astonishing even the erudite King of Hades, who could find no explanation for it and in the end could only attribute it to the principle of joint Buddhist-Daoist cultivation, which perhaps held some hidden affinity that mysteriously enhanced a man's progress.

But hidden though he was in the shadows, and though he gave no thought to these ordinary disciples, Ming Li was genuinely troubled by the dozen or so roads laid out before him, not knowing which way to take. In slipping secretly into the valley this time, his private aim had been to probe thoroughly what secrets the Burning Cloud Valley held within, and best of all to discover its relations with those southern barbarian tribes.

To learn such things he would naturally need to reach the places where the valley's important personages were to be found; but the paths before his eyes looked like nothing so much as a maze, and truly gave him a headache.

Just as Ming Li frowned in thought, weighing whether to seize a Burning Cloud Valley disciple and force the truth from him, there was a sudden stirring at his shoulder, and a faint moan from Little Grey reached his ear.

Ming Li started and turned to look, and his whole body shook. The monkey Little Grey was clutching his clothes tightly with both hands, its face contorted, its eyes squeezed shut, as though in pain—but it was a creature of understanding and knew this was no time to cry out, and so it endured.

Ming Li was badly startled; somehow, ever since they had entered the valley, Little Grey had seemed a little off, and now it appeared to be suffering some great torment.

Reaching up, he gently lifted Little Grey down and examined it closely, and felt the monkey's body trembling faintly in his palm—plainly it was summoning all its strength to withstand some nameless agony. Ming Li's heart grew heavier with worry, and he whispered, "What is it, Little Grey?"

As though at the sound of its master's voice, Little Grey tilted its head and slowly opened its eyes.

A strange gleam of gold faintly tinged with dark red, like eerie ghost-fire in the night, or more like uncanny demon eyes from the depths of the underworld, appeared before Ming Li.

The air around them seemed suddenly to grow cold.

Little Grey's breathing began to deepen, and Ming Li could clearly feel the grip of the monkey's claws on his hands growing stronger and stronger, the claws sinking deep into his flesh.

The monkey's mouth slowly opened and closed, but the uncanny golden glow in its eyes was fixed hard on Ming Li, never slackening for an instant. And from those eyes Ming Li distinctly felt something familiar—the same bloodthirsty look he himself had worn in the days when he went mad…

In an instant Ming Li felt a chill over his whole body, and he jerked his head around to look at what lay at his hand. Within the sleeve, at some unknowable moment, the Blood-Devouring Bead above the tip of the Soul-Devourer had begun to give off a faint, ghostly blue radiance tinged with blood.

The Blood-Devouring Bead!

The most vicious and evil thing in all the world—and it was uncanny as this…