Chapter 185 — Mad Dog

Zhou Yixuan stopped too, glanced around, and saw a dead log lying on its side nearby. He hurried over, plopped himself down on it, and stretched in a great lazy yawn of relief from the bottom of his heart. Then he shot Xiao Wan a look and said: "Yes, she's the busy one, she's the merciful one—so she gave her own grandfather's rations away to others to eat, and now even your grandfather goes hungry."

Xiao Wan blushed, came over, and stood behind Zhou Yixuan. She reached out both hands and gently pounded his shoulders. "Grandfather, we're still not so bad off. But look at those people—if they don't eat something soon, they truly won't have the strength to walk on, and I fear they'll die where they stand."

The Wild Wolf Daoist looked about and said: "You two sit here a while. I'll go into the woods and see if I can catch some game, just to stave off hunger for now."

Xiao Wan smiled at the Wild Wolf Daoist: "All right, thank you for the trouble, Daoist."

The Wild Wolf Daoist grinned broadly. Zhou Yixuan suddenly gave a sniff and sneered: "What are you grinning for?

And grinning's one thing, but why do I, this old man, find your grin so utterly lecherous? Don't tell me you've got some wicked thought brewing in that head of yours?"

The Wild Wolf Daoist started in fright and hastily wiped the grin from his face. He glanced at Xiao Wan, and seeing her looking at him with a trace of apology, his eyes lit up at once—where was there the slightest anger left in him? He acted as though Zhou Yixuan did not exist at all, utterly ignoring him, and said to Xiao Wan: "Then wait for me to come back." With that, he strode quickly into the forest.

Zhou Yixuan grumbled a few cross words under his breath, and Xiao Wan chided gently from behind him: "Grandfather, that Wild Dog Daoist has been with us so long now—why do you still never give him a kind look? And besides, he's taken care of us all along this road, and he's not a bad man!"

Zhou Yixuan snorted: "And what do you know of bad men and good? He follows us only because he wants to..."

"Grandfather!" Xiao Wan cried, cutting him off. Zhou Yixuan stammered a few complaints and said no more.

Whish, whish came sounds from the forest, followed by a flurry of flapping. After a good while, quick footsteps approached, and the Wild Wolf Daoist, his face alight with joy, came running out of the woods carrying a wild bird. In the days since that great calamity of the beast-demons, all living things had been laid waste; even in the mountains and wilds, these beasts and birds were scarcer than in former days. Today the Wild Wolf Daoist had been lucky indeed—he had actually caught a bird that had slipped the net!

The Wild Wolf Daoist ran back to the clearing, elated, and called out loudly: "Look what I've caught..." Suddenly his voice broke off—upon the open ground where they had been, there was not a single soul. Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan had both vanished.

"Plop." The wild bird fell from the Wild Wolf Daoist's hand to the ground.

The night wind was cold, and the chill seemed in an instant to seep into the very marrow of his bones. The Wild Wolf Daoist's body began, somehow, faintly to tremble. He walked forward step by step; upon that dead log lying on the ground there were even the marks where Zhou Yixuan had just sat.

"They've gone, gone..." The Wild Wolf Daoist's mind was in utter chaos, and upon that dog's face his expression shifted and changed, a look of vast terror and grief. At this moment the wild dog stood dumb as a wooden cock, but a moment later his body suddenly

quivered, and his eyes lit up—for he saw, behind the dead log, several disordered footprints, and in the soft earth beside those prints, plain to see, a gigantic footprint a full size larger than any man's, with three toes in front—nothing that belonged to humankind.

The Wild Wolf Daoist's expression changed drastically—first great joy, then great alarm. And at that very moment, from afar there seemed to come a long howl, so shrill and bitter it was like a vicious wolf baying at the moon. The Wild Wolf Daoist involuntarily took a step back, but a moment later the muscles of his dog's face twitched faintly, and with a sudden great roar he flung himself bodily toward the howling deep in the dense forest, and from the look of him, he might well have been a mad dog.

A dog gone mad!

Just as the Wild Wolf Daoist charged into the dense forest, upon the dark vault of heaven a white light suddenly blazed up, racing down from the north, scoring across the sky, piercing the void and gone—without pausing for even a moment, flying straight south like a shooting star. And upon the ground, after a time, while that white light still lingered at the horizon, a black shadow appeared not far from the clearing. Looked at closely, it was a figure all in black, face masked, breathing somewhat raggedly, who stopped in the forest and muttered to himself:

"How could his cultivation have advanced so? It's like seeing a ghost." As he rested, he suddenly seemed to sense something, turned his head, and glanced deep into the dense forest. Faint sounds of fighting came from within. The man in black hesitated a moment, then raised his head again to gaze at that white light in the sky, shook his head, and sighed. Then his body flickered, and light as a phantom he slipped into the very direction the Wild Wolf Daoist had charged.

The Wild Wolf Daoist held his fang-treasure in hand, his face tense—and in but a short while, a patch of dark red had spread across his shoulder; he seemed already to have taken a wound. Yet before him stood two enormous beast-demons, tiger-headed and lion-bodied, a full man's height at the shoulder; beside them the Wild Wolf Daoist looked utterly outmatched.

Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan were, at this moment, plainly behind those two beast-demons. Here in the dense forest these two beast-demons seemed to have made a lair in this desolate spot, within which branches and leaves were heaped in wild confusion, and a rank stench assailed the nose. But most horrifying of all: the place was strewn everywhere with the remains of the dead—and besides Zhou Yixuan and Xiao Wan, there were seven or eight living people here as well, though all of them either lay unconscious or, if awake, were thin as sticks and wild with terror.

Who knew where these two beast-demons had raided to seize so many people—but from this one could well imagine how terrible that great calamity of the beast-demons had been!

Facing those two enormous beast-demons, the Wild Wolf Daoist's breath came short and fast, every nerve drawn taut in vigilance. He had only just charged to this spot and caught sight of Zhou Yixuan and little Wan indeed being here when, before he could even shout, he had already come under attack from the two beast-demons. In the exchange that followed, these two beast-demons proved far from ordinary, possessed of boundless strength, and had actually torn open the Wild Wolf Daoist's shoulder. Even so, the Wild Wolf Daoist was, after all, a cultivator and no common mortal; in his panic he brought out his magic treasure and likewise wounded one of the beast-demons, whose foreleg now ran slick with blood, clearly faring none too well either.

It was only that these two beast-demons looked savage in the extreme; at the sight of blood they did not draw back but fixed their stare all the harder upon the Wild Wolf Daoist, restrained for the moment only by fear of the treasure in his hand, and so the two sides stood locked in a standoff. Yet the Wild Wolf Daoist was secretly crying bitter misery in his heart; from that last clash he knew well enough that against one such beast-demon he might perhaps win through at grievous cost, but against the two together he was certain to die.