Chapter 102 — Little Grey
劍問蒼天 · Page 2 of 9
Ming Li rose slowly as well. "I do not know either," he said. "But I remember we flew into the Heaven Emperor's Treasure House."
Lu Xueling was silent a moment. "Did you save me?"
Ming Li glanced at her, then said flatly, "No. You were lucky—you flew in yourself before the stone door closed."
Lu Xueling turned her head and looked at him without expression, her eyes bright even in the darkness, as though glinting with light.
Ming Li did not meet her eyes; he turned his head away and began walking toward that faint glow, saying as he went, "You owe me nothing. If you want to kill me, go ahead."
Lu Xueling stood quietly in the darkness behind him, lingering there a while; then she lightly brushed the dust from her clothes and composed herself.
"Squeak, squeak!"
Little Grey, who had been sent tumbling head over heels and left dizzy by the shock, now recovered; it came bounding over, and with a few quick leaps scrambled up onto Ming Li's shoulder, where it lay and peered toward that beam of light flickering with mysterious colors.
As they drew nearer, what came into view grew clearer.
It was a wooden stand set upright in the darkness, about half a man's height: a round wooden pillar perhaps as thick as a baby's arm ran down into the ground, and on its upper end rested a small platform about a foot across.
In the middle of the platform sat a cup of antique, artless shape, which also looked to be made of wood; and on closer look one could see that the whole stand and the cup were in fact one unbroken piece, joined as a single body with the tree beneath the ground.
But what drew the eye most was what lay within that little wooden cup. The cup stood perhaps three inches tall and two inches wide, half filled with a clear liquid, and floating on that liquid was a small, transparent stone, cut flat on five faces, crystalline and translucent. It was from this stone that the soft light issued, forming a semicircular veil of radiance over the little wooden stand, refracting colors of every hue and sending them spreading all around.
By now Lu Xueling had come over as well, and stood beside Ming Li, looking toward the wooden cup.
In the air there drifted faintly a strange fragrance, everywhere present, which lifted the spirits as one breathed it.
Neither Ming Li nor Lu Xueling was of the common run, yet even they could not tell what this thing was. In truth, this wooden stand within the Heaven Emperor's Treasure House, and what the cup held, were none other than the immortal elixir said to be the Heaven Emperor's secret hoard. The stand and the cup alike were one body with the wondrous tree beneath their feet, and it was by that tree's own ten-thousand-year spiritual essence that the elixir was preserved.
And outside the Heaven Emperor's Treasure House, what had made the Blackwater Mystic Serpent—an ancient demon-beast of that order—drool so, and even dare to do battle with the Yellow Bird, the natural foe that guarded the elixir, was precisely this one cup of elixir, so unremarkable to look at.
As for how Ming Li's and Lu Xueling's wounds had suddenly and mysteriously healed, that too had to do with this elixir and with this treasure house.
Only, legends and secret lore of this kind were by now known to almost no one; neither Ming Li nor Lu Xueling had ever heard of it, and faced with such a treasure of heaven and earth, they merely frowned in puzzlement.
As they pondered, suddenly there came another great crash, and the whole Heaven Emperor's Treasure House shook violently; at the same time the Blackwater Mystic Serpent's dreadful hissing roar rang out again—the ancient leviathan was in a fury, it seemed, and still would not give up the elixir.