Chapter 124 — Black Fire
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 5 of 5
He raised his head to the sky and shouted, "Great Bear God aaaaaah..."
The cry was shrill and savage, shaking the fields, and in an instant every Li warrior howled with him and surged forward. In that moment of flying blood, they stood at the very edge of life and death.
The night was burning, and men were mad!
The Miao warriors fought to the death, but against Li warriors gone berserk, they slowly lost the courage to fight and fell back.
The river in Qili Dong slowly turned red, mirroring the countless fireballs falling from the sky!
The red light surged up, rising into the sky to meet those huge fireballs, forming a blood-red barrier that spread over all Qili Dong.
Countless blazing fireballs struck the blood-red curtain almost at once. Tremendous explosions echoed through the mountains, throwing up great blossoms of red flame.
The great shaman raised both hands high above his head, the tall wooden staff pointing straight at the sky, and threw all his strength into the struggle against that mysterious figure in the heavens. Yet as time wore on, the pressure descending from the sky grew ever greater, until it had reached a degree that was almost beyond human endurance.
The great shaman was shaken to the core. In a thousand years, no such strange art or uncanny power had ever arisen among the Li. Had it existed, they would surely have unleashed it two hundred years ago, in that decisive battle of the sacred vessels that determined the fate of the two peoples.
But the mysterious figure in the sky before him now seemed like an invincible god of war...
Deep in the great shaman's heart, a shadow gathered and grew. This bizarre art was not of this world at all; it belonged to that legend of a mysterious demon, secretly passed down in the southern borderlands for thousands of years...
In the sky, the flames blazed. Ahetai stood atop the clouds, his excited face dyed red by the fire around him, unable any longer to conceal his triumph. Deeply shaken since childhood by the calamities that had befallen his people, he had cast everything aside and gone deep into the Ten Thousand Mountains of Waste, where he found that demon and begged for its boundless, mighty power. And now, at last, he could save his people from the abyss of suffering.
And the first step toward a better life for the Li lay in this very moment: to trample the Miao wholly underfoot, to seize back the bone jade inlaid in the Miao's sacred vessel, the Black Staff, and offer it in sacrifice to the great Bear God. No—what was the Bear God worth? When the Li suffered, where was the Bear God then?
Ahetai roared in his heart and drove his power forth; in an instant, a dozen more enormous fireballs came surging down from the clouds. As he watched with fierce delight, each impact of fireball against the red curtain making that once-invincible figure tremble again and again, he had already resolved in his heart that once victory was won, he would make the whole Li people forsake their old faith and turn to that deity—for only He could bring the Li a new birth!
Note: The Li people are descended from a branch of the ancient Baiyue. As far back as before the Qin and Han dynasties, one branch of the "Luoyue" crossed the sea from the mainland to Hainan Island; in the Sui dynasty the island's inhabitants were called "Liliao," the forebears of the Li. Today they live chiefly in the Li and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of central and southern Hainan Province, with the rest scattered among Wanning, Tunchang, Qionghai, Chengmai, Lu County, Ding'an and other counties, dwelling intermixed with the Han. "Li" is their pronunciation of the word for "mountain ridge," transformed over time.