Chapter 130 — The Sinister Forest
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 4 of 6
Jin Pingyue's face was pale. Her white hands swept again and again, and the violet radiance blazed brighter, shifting in an instant from above her head to beneath her body. Before she touched the ground, that blood-chilling "thuck-thuck" sound had already begun to ring out without pause. Within the range of the violet light, more than a dozen monster bodies burst apart with a thunderous crash, blood spraying everywhere, until even Jin Pingyue's own body was stained red over a great portion.
But that reek of blood seemed only to inflame the monsters around her further, and in the blink of an eye countless others came lunging up again. Sweat had already appeared on Jin Pingyue's brow. Without the slightest hesitation, she swung the Violet Radiance Blade to hold off one wave of beasts, forced her body upward, and threw all her strength into charging forward.
At this moment Jin Pingyue's situation was perilous in the extreme: below her countless savage beasts gave chase, above her endless monstrous trees blocked the way. She could go neither up nor down, and could only fly forward with all her might through the midst of the forest.
By now the Black Forest was filled everywhere with the shrieking of monsters, echoing far and wide; the black wind howled, and the whole place was a hell on earth.
Dodging the sharp claws of a beast that leaped at her in midair, Jin Pingyue cut a whole black tree that blocked her path clean in two with a single stroke and flew through the gap. Yet what appeared ahead was only more monsters and endless black trees that seemed like demons and fiends...
Fighting and fleeing forward in this way, she knew not how long it lasted, until at the very moment when Jin Pingyue felt her strength beginning to fail her, a thread of light suddenly showed through the dimness ahead.
Jin Pingyue was overjoyed, her spirits surging. The Violet Radiance Blade flared brilliantly; with one stroke she cut down a huge grey wolf that had lunged up from the ground, and threw her whole body toward that light.
Shadows danced like roaring demons; countless black trees pressed down from above. Wrapped in the violet radiance, Jin Pingyue cut down every beast she met and felled every tree in her path, slaughtering her way through until flesh and blood flew everywhere and ghosts seemed to weep and wolves to howl—forcing a passage clean through that uncanny, unfathomable Black Forest. Behind her lay broken branches and beast carcasses, blood and black sap spattering across the sky.
When she burst out of that Black Forest, this woman who had once been so charming and alluring was covered from head to toe in blood and filth, like a figure of blood, hideous and dreadful beyond words.
Yet when she made out the surroundings, her breath still coming in gasps, her face changed once more. She was standing on what was unmistakably a cliff—merely a huge rock left bare by the Black Forest. Beneath the rock drifted cloud and mist, and where the light of the sky passed through, strange colored radiance seemed to flow.
One glance was enough for Jin Pingyue to know that those colored clouds and mists were the deadliest miasma, fatal to any who touched them. And now, from the Black Forest behind her, the roaring of countless monsters rose again—right at her back.
Jin Pingyue clenched her teeth, gripped the Violet Radiance Blade tighter still, and whirled around—only to feel a roaring buzz in her head that nearly brought her to her knees, her body swaying several times. These past days she had scarcely rested properly at all, and today she had faced countless savage beasts and demon trees besides; even a body of iron would have been strained to exhaustion.