Chapter 249 — Nine Tails

The corner of Xiao Bai's mouth tightened, and her white form suddenly rose like duckweed, drifting upward as though lifted by the wind, incomparably graceful—yet her eyes, brimming with liquid light, remained fixed on the ground below. After a moment, suspended in midair, she suddenly flung out her sleeve and swept it toward the earth.

The sweep carried no small force; several sharp whistles of air being split rang out in the night sky. As the sleeve passed over the ground, sand flew and stones scattered, dust whirling wildly. Nor did Xiao Bai pause in midair: she swept her sleeve downward again and again, seven times in succession, until the dust on the ground had gathered into a small grey tornado, thick with shattered stone and grit, spinning furiously, rising up beneath the starry night.

With a light cry Xiao Bai shot upward another ten feet or more. Beneath the stars her white figure drifted like a fairy's, dazzling to the eye and bearing a beauty all the more bewitching. As she rose, the column of sand and grit was seized by an invisible force and dragged violently upward—then flung abruptly out in the opposite direction. So swift was that wind that in moments the pillar of whirling grit had swept far into the distance, and from the darkness came a continuous rumbling—doubtless the sound of stones smashing against the earth.

And beneath Xiao Bai's feet, where the summit of Mount Huqi had been, there now stood a great pit six feet wide and more than ten feet deep. To carve such a hole in a mountain peak hard as iron with a mere lift of her hand—such cultivation was enough to shock the world. Yet for a Nine-Tailed Celestial Fox with a thousand years of cultivation, it was hardly surprising.

Of course, Xiao Bai had hardly come to the mountaintop in the dead of night out of boredom to dig a hole. Descending slowly from midair, her eyes never once left the pit; her white figure drifted straight down into it. Once inside, her descent slowed sharply, as though some invisible thing were supporting her from below, and she stared intently at the pit's walls, peering closely by the faint starlight from above.

Her slender white hand pressed against the rough stone wall, a striking contrast that gave an uncanny sensation—but Xiao Bai paid it no mind at all. She only followed her palm, followed her slow descent, studying the walls of the pit.

What met her eyes was blue-grey stone, rough and hard, cold as ice to the touch. Then, as she sank slowly lower, her gaze traveled down with her. A foot down, still the same blue-grey rock, without the slightest change, identical to the stone above and to mountain rock everywhere in the world.

She continued to descend, her pale palm resting on the rock wall, drifting gently down. Two feet deep—still the same blue-grey, hard stone.

Three feet...

Four feet...

Five feet...

No change at all. Still that hard rock, its chill seeming to have endured for a thousand ages, and now, suddenly brought to light, radiating coldly from its rough surface.

No expression showed on Xiao Bai's face; her body continued its gentle descent. Then, suddenly, her eyes lit up, and she trembled in midair and stopped.

On the rock wall six feet below the surface, beside her pale hand, the hard stone at last showed its first anomaly.

A faint red trace, like a thin thread of blood, appeared upon the stone.

Xiao Bai fixed her gaze on that thin red mark for a long while, then a cold smile flickered at the corner of her mouth, and she began to descend slowly once more, her eyes never leaving the stone wall. Sure enough, as her figure sank lower, more anomalies revealed themselves before her eyes: the rock, which ought to have grown harder and more blue-grey the deeper it went, instead showed a slow increase in fine cracks the further down she went, while the color of the stone deepened as well, gradually turning red. The red marks multiplied, and their color grew ever darker, until at the bottom of the pit, more than ten feet down, Xiao Bai turned slowly to look—and there before her was a cliff face steeped in a vivid crimson like blood, great fissures visible everywhere, and around her the stone no longer gave off a cold breath but exuded instead a thick, pungent stench of gore.

That shocking blood-red, that dreadfulness that seemed about to devour a person whole!

Unconcealed disgust showed in Xiao Bai's eyes. With a cold snort, her form stirred, and her white figure shot skyward, flying out of the cave to alight on the ground beside the deep pit. Starlight spilled down through the night, falling once more upon her white figure like water, washing away that scene out of a nightmare.

Xiao Bai's expression was placid. She drew a deep breath, faced the night wind blowing from afar, and raised her head to the sky. After a moment, she gave a sudden cold laugh and murmured low to herself, "A thousand years, a hundred years—there are always those who don't know the height of heaven or the depth of earth, always someone determined to do something foolish. As for how it all ends, we shall see together. Heh heh heh heh..."

The cold laughter drifted softly on the night wind, carried away with it, off to some unknown corner of the world; and beneath the night sky, amid the starlight, that beautiful white figure still stood atop the mountain peaks, facing the wind, bearing a beauty of some otherworldly, breathtaking kind, standing alone and forlorn.

That deep night, it seemed, many others likewise could not sleep, as though something lingered in their hearts and stirred a vague, inexplicable feeling—people always have some sensation they cannot put into words.

Within the cave chambers of Mount Huqi, Ming Li and Master Gui were still absorbed in fathoming the star plate. They had reached a rather critical stage; with Master Gui's vast learning, he had actually managed to deduce a few of the ancient characters on the jade disc—though he had not yet penetrated the secret of the star plate, things were plainly much better than before.

And in the midst of this tension, Ming Li suddenly felt something stir in his heart. His gaze left the star plate for a moment, and he looked around; the space beside him was empty—Xiao Hui had run off somewhere to play again, or perhaps found a spot to sleep. A flicker of movement caught the corner of his eye, falling on the scroll that had been rolled into a bundle at his side. He fell silent a moment, as though something had come to mind, and a faint smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.

Yet though warm, the smile vanished quickly. He gave a slight shake of his head, as if casting aside something he ought not to be thinking of just then, and then buried himself once more in that profoundly abstruse star plate.

Elsewhere in the belly of Mount Huqi, in the silent chamber of cold ice, mist drifted gently. Bi Li still slept in quiet slumber, and at her side the Nether King sat silently.

Grizzled hair hung down from his head, a reminder that the years had grown old, and the sleeping figure beside him wrung his heart with a dull ache. On such a deep night, as on countless nights these ten years past, he had no desire for sleep.

He waited quietly, waiting for dawn, waiting for tomorrow—perhaps, when tomorrow came, everything truly would change!

His hand clenched without his willing it, balling into a fist.

A thousand li away, the same lonely, silent deep of night.

High on Little Zhu Peak of Mount Canglan, the night wind howled and bamboo waves rustled in waves. Lu Xueling rose slowly from her sleeping couch; this night, for some reason, she simply could not sleep.

Tossing and turning—for whose sake?