Chapter 111 — The Strange Beast
劍問蒼天 · Page 1 of 5
The Mystic Fire Altar.
Though it was a wooden door, it felt heavy to the touch. Under Ming Li's effort, the massive, solid door of the Mystic Fire Altar gave a muffled creak and swung slowly inward.
Beyond the door, a faint red glow spilled out. The air around seemed to rise a few degrees more, unbearably hot and dry.
Ming Li frowned. A fine sheen of sweat had already broken out on his forehead, and he could not help thinking of what he had heard earlier from the side—that old man named Shangguan had actually stood guard in this scorching place for nearly a hundred years. He truly could not imagine how the man had endured it.
The interior of the Mystic Fire Altar was not bright. Apart from a trace of red light coming from some unknown source, it seemed mostly dim and shadowed—ill-matched to the fierce heat outside. Ming Li stood at the threshold, pondered for a moment, and at last stepped inside.
With another creak, the wooden door swung gently shut.
Ming Li drew a deep breath, steadied his mind, and began to survey his surroundings. As he had guessed from seeing the altar outside, the interior was indeed a vast hall, five zhang high, circular in form, its walls built—just as the outside had appeared—of that same crimson rock. There was no carving or ornament of any kind, utterly plain and unadorned, and yet against the scale of that immense space it took on an indescribable grandeur, making one feel that only such plainness could be the true highest attainment of architecture.
Very quickly Ming Li realized that the red radiance filling the hall all came from its center. The closer one drew to the center, the brighter the surroundings became, until from a distance, against that red glow, the heart of the hall seemed to be a mass of blazing fire burning away.
Ming Li stared at that "flame." The red light washed softly over him, mirrored in his eyes, and fell also upon little Grey crouched on his shoulder.
In the eyes of both man and monkey, something seemed at the same moment to have dyed them red, and faint flames of crimson burned within.
Grey's tail gave a slight flick, as though it too felt uneasy, and it gave a low cry.
Ming Li stepped forward, walking slowly toward that "flame" at the center of the hall, toward the depths of the red light.
As he drew nearer to the "flame," the air around grew hotter still, until at this moment it was almost like standing beside subterranean lava. Into Ming Li's mind, he knew not why, there suddenly rose a memory long forgotten—beneath the Fire Dragon Cave, the lake of magma hotter even than this, and that pair of fox spirits who had thrown themselves into it...
The thought flashed past. Less than a zhang from the center of the hall, he suddenly halted. Grey turned its head to look at its master.
Ming Li's brows were knitted; his gaze had drawn back from the flame and now rested on the floor.
There upon the smooth floor of crimson stone blocks, a pattern had appeared.
Right beneath Ming Li's feet, grooves the thickness of a finger had emerged in the stone, extending to either side, yet winding and crooked, not straight at all. And a foot before Ming Li, grooves of that same finger's thickness ran in bold, serpentine strokes across the hard crimson rock, forming a pattern a foot square.
It was a deity!
A deity Ming Li had never seen before, never even heard of.
The vigorous grooves wound slowly across the floor, their edges everywhere bearing the marks of ages' wear, betraying the great antiquity of these patterns and a certain desolate austerity.
The deity's head was hairless, but bore horns curving gently like a ram's. Its features were much like a man's, save that beneath a pair of sunken, hollow eyes, its mouth was plainly armed with sharp fangs. The carver had even cut several tiny holes beside those fangs, as though blood were dripping from them, adding a further measure of ferocity and menace.