Chapter 86 — King's Village
劍問蒼天 · Page 5 of 7
As for the southwest, there lies the great Deathmoor, whose very name turns men pale. Its climate is the very opposite of the northwestern wastes: of every ten days in the year, seven or eight bring rain, and strange plants grow thick as the hairs of an ox, rank and luxuriant. Such cold, damp places have always been the dwelling of the world's great poisons and savage beasts and venomous insects, and the marsh's peculiar poisonous vapors rise seething from the rotting mud whenever it rains. If a man breathes them in and has no proper antidote, in less than half an hour the poison strikes his heart and kills him. Beyond that, over a thousand years the rain-soaked and rotted bodies of beasts, trees, grasses and flowers have turned this place into a land of lurking peril: one careless misstep and a man is sucked down into the bottomless marsh, never to see the sun again, to die a wretched death.
Such a perilous place would ordinarily draw no one. But not long ago, word suddenly spread through the world that in the western Deathmoor a great golden pillar of light had burst upward, piercing the heavens, and burned without cease for a day and a night, so that even at midnight it lit that patch of sky bright as day. Only after three days did the golden light gradually fade, and from that time on, a vast and uncanny shrieking seemed always to come faintly from within the Deathmoor, filling those who dwelt at its edges with dread.
Once the news spread, the whole world was stirred. In the eyes of cultivators, numinous objects and divine artifacts have always possessed their own spirituality; such a great golden light must surely be the herald of some rare and wondrous treasure come into the world, summoning those whose fate it is to come. And judging by that pillar of light, the treasure's marvels were no small matter. For a time the world was shaken, and masters of both righteous and demon paths gathered in swarms.
Yet beneath that surface turmoil ran hidden currents, surging unseen.
Half a day's journey east of the Deathmoor lay a desolate, dwindling little village called King's Village, so named because its people worshipped a mysterious deity called the "Great King." Only this deity had never been very efficacious: it neither brought the villagers promotion or wealth, nor granted them abundant harvests and freedom from want.
And in truth, one need only think: living at the edge of such a Deathmoor, where now and then some monster would come bursting out of nowhere, or a venomous insect come running, and killing the livestock was the least of it—every year no small number of people died of such things. Those with any ability had long since left this cursed place for the Central Plains; those who remained were mostly folk with no spirit left in them.
But in these few days King's Village had suddenly grown lively, with cultivators of the true way coming and going. Though King's Village was not the only way into the Deathmoor, it was the nearest inhabited place to the marsh; most people came here before entering to buy dry rations and clean water, and within a few days the villagers had actually made a little money and gained a little spirit.
At the same time, because this was the nearest place to the Deathmoor, it was the villagers here who first noticed the golden pillar of light and the uncanny shrieking, and from them the word spread; and so many came here to inquire after news.
Only, once the people multiplied, there were naturally both righteous and demon among them, and within a few days this little place, King's Village, had seen more fights than anyone could count. Some unlucky fellows, before ever entering the Deathmoor, had already died here for no apparent reason—a sorry fate indeed.