Chapter 130 — The Sinister Forest
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 3 of 6
The spilled blood, under the faint glow of the phosphorescence, slowly seeped into the earth and darkened to a deep hue.
Before Jin Pingyue could touch down, the darkness ahead suddenly erupted with countless beast-roars. In an instant the former stillness was shattered, as if a hundred beasts howled at the heavens, rising and falling in the dark. Within moments, behind those flickering lights of phosphorescence, pairs upon pairs of eyes—some large, some small, all glinting with savage light—emerged one by one, shining in the darkness.
Jin Pingyue drew a deep breath, and her face seemed to pale a little.
With one long howl, they came suddenly like a great river thundering down; a rush of pounding feet pierced the silence of the dark, roaring toward her, spreading ever wider, closing Jin Pingyue in the middle.
"Roar..."
In that instant, countless monsters burst from the darkness and hurled themselves at that slender figure.
Jin Pingyue's form drifted and darted, dodging and weaving through the flood of beasts that blotted out sky and earth, while purple gleams flashed in her hands; at every sweep, monsters howled and died. But the beasts that had come so suddenly were far too many, and in moments they packed that patch of ground so tightly there was scarcely room to set a foot. At the last she was leaping and wheeling across the backs of the strange creatures.
In a short while more than twenty monsters had died beneath the Purple Edge, but the legs of Jin Pingyue's trousers had been torn in several places. And in the darkness beyond, an endless horde of beasts still seemed to be pouring out—where in this dark forest could so many monsters possibly come from?
Jin Pingyue pressed her lips together, knowing she must not be entangled with these savage creatures. She stretched her right foot down and touched it to the back of a tiger-headed, leopard-bodied monster, and her whole body soared upward into the air.
At first, following Jin Pingyue's wishes, she was unwilling to fly out over the Black Forest. For one thing, doing so would inevitably expose their position, and there seemed to be poisonous miasma above the forest as well; for another—and more importantly—once they left the Black Forest, tracking the Necromancer ahead would become far more difficult.
But at a time like this, there was no room to worry about such things. Her body shot straight upward. The monsters on the ground below were savage, but none of them seemed able to fly; countless beasts packed the earth, roaring and bellowing, hideous beyond description, truly terrifying.
Just as Jin Pingyue was about to reach the tops of the towering trees, a strange noise rang out. The black trees that had been tangled together in dense thickets suddenly seemed to come alive, and amid the shifting shadows countless black shapes swooped down from above, mingled with a heavy stench—there was likely deadly poison among them as well.
Jin Pingyue was startled but did not lose her head. Her body halted abruptly in midair, and where a violet gleam flashed, a ring of purple light appeared above her head. A moment later the black shadows struck down through the air; meeting that violet radiance, they burst apart with a ceaseless crackling, and in an instant more than a dozen dark shapes shattered and flew scattering in all directions. Seen from afar, they were black branches—only what sprayed through the air along with them was a foul black sap.
Though Jin Pingyue had blocked that one wave of monstrous trees falling from the sky, her body was still driven downward. The countless beasts on the ground grew excited at once, roaring and howling in chorus, and many leaped up with all their strength, lunging at her falling body.