Chapter 133 — Resurrection
劍問蒼天 · Page 1 of 5
The darkness spread without end, and only the wailing of the cold wind grew more shrill. The shaman walked through the black corridor of the Ancient Cave of Demon Suppression like a spirit bound for the ninth hell.
The ancient cave grew broader with every step, yet the darkness around him deepened all the more. Walking this cold and dreadful path, the shaman could even have shut his eyes and gone on.
For how many years had he wandered here alone? And now, at last, he would change his own fate with his own hands.
Perhaps the fate of countless souls in the world as well.
The cold wind howled—there, just ahead of him!
A faint glimmer suddenly kindled before him. Faint though it was, in that expanse of pitch-black it stood out unmistakably.
The shaman halted.
The glimmer twinkled gently in the dark, flickering in and out, as if summoning, as if tempting, as if yearning, as if mocking…
The wind stirred the hem of his black robe, just as it had through all those bygone years, and he gazed at that place.
How many years ago had he stood here just so? But in those days there had still been a brother at his side, and before him a figure that, frail as it was, seemed able to blot out heaven and earth.
And now there was only his lonely shadow.
"My lady…" He bowed his head slightly and murmured the words.
Then he drifted forward, hurling himself toward the glimmer with the resolve of a moth to flame.
The glimmer blazed forth, and the cold wind in the ancient cave suddenly turned violent. What had been a single point of light slowly spread outward, gradually illuminating its surroundings.
On the uneven ground lay rotting white bones everywhere—the bones of men, and of beasts. Under the glow, the immense cave walls and their hard rock revealed countless dense, crisscrossing cracks, as though something had torn them open by force—a sight to make the heart quail.
In the darkness, a voice echoed softly from the deepest heart of that glimmer, cold as ice.
"You have returned…"
The last note lingered long, reverberating between the rock walls of the ancient cave.
The shaman said nothing. He merely stood within that light a moment, then stretched out his arm from his black robe—and in his hand was unmistakably the black staff set with bone jade.
"ROAR!…"
A roar burst forth like sudden thunder, seething through the ancient cave. The surrounding darkness recoiled in an instant, and deep within that faint radiance a blinding light flashed out, like the countless tentacles of a demon, crying and howling toward the shaman, toward those two sacred relics.
Even the cave walls, ancient beyond reckoning, began to tremble, great stones and small falling together.
The shrill, whistling cold wind now sounded like a heavy, yearning gasp.
"…Do you still remember what my lady looked like?" The shaman gazed at the blinding light clawing and posturing before him and suddenly said this, quietly.
Within the fierce glare, the flickering light seemed to freeze for an instant.
The shaman's black robes snapped and cracked in the violent wind.
Even his voice seemed to drift and waver: "Her stone image still stands at the mouth of the cave outside…"
Deep within that radiance there was no sound at all—only the shifting, stretching beams of light, casting the shaman's figure bright and dim by turns.
The shaman said no more. Slowly he drifted upward, into the depths of the light.
An open flat expanse suddenly appeared. It was utterly unlike the outside: the hard rock walls were mostly intact, but upon the ground lay great bones, and mostly whole ones—thirteen of them, by a careful count.
These thirteen skeletons, of varied shapes and reeking of demonic aura, formed a ring at uneven intervals, all facing inward with their backs to the outside, as though guarding something. In their black, hollow eye sockets there seemed to lurk a cold gaze.