Chapter 149 — Deadly Poison
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 5 of 9
And just as these snakes were joyfully squabbling over their food, many of them suddenly froze, raised their heads warily, and then all turned toward the entrance of Venomous Snake Valley.
Far off down that desolate old road, there seemed to come the low, muffled boom of war drums. The whole earth began slowly to quiver, and strange sounds, like the advance of a thousand troops and ten thousand horses, came from the endless distance.
In the morning valley, all at once there fell a deathly stillness.
"Hah!"
Letting out a long, vicious breath, Fan Xiong—the eldest disciple the Poison God had taken in his lifetime—savagely flung out his hand, tossing aside the corpse of a Ten Thousand Venoms Sect disciple whose skull he had crushed in his grip. The body flew through the air and with a bang struck the offering table before the mourning hall, then dropped.
As though some demon were laughing coldly in the dark, or as though an offering must be made to the Poison God, that lord of the Demonic Sect whose hands had been steeped in slaughter—within and around the mourning hall where the Poison God's coffin lay, blood now ran in rivers, and the corpses of Ten Thousand Venoms Sect disciples lay everywhere.
A thick stench of human blood hung in the air.
By now the three factions of the Poison God's three great disciples—Fan Xiong, Cheng Wuya, and Duan Rushan—had been slaughtering one another for days. Apart from a few leaders of deep cultivation, more than half the ordinary disciples of the Ten Thousand Venoms Sect lay dead or wounded, and the days of fighting had long since reddened the eyes of these three men struggling for power; they had all but descended into madness.
On the offering table in the mourning hall, the box holding the sect master's seal still lay quietly, watching it all with cold eyes.
As though they had killed until they were weary, the fighting within and around the mourning hall gradually subsided—yet the tension, blades drawn and bows bent, was greater than ever.
The third, Duan Rushan, flanked by four elders of grotesque appearance, his eyes flashing with savage light, looked at Fan Xiong and Cheng Wuya standing apart before him and sneered, "I say, my two senior brothers, will you still not give up? Apart from the few old fellows at your sides, who else do you have left to field?"
Fan Xiong and Cheng Wuya exchanged a glance, each seeing despair in the other's bloodshot eyes. Ever since that night, the last of the Poison God's seven-day mourning rites, when strange sounds had suddenly issued from the mourning hall, the three factions—already on guard against one another—had immediately stormed into the hall in force, fearful of being too late and losing the sect master's seal to a thief.
In that chaos, countless people poured into the mourning hall, each naturally assuming the others had long since plotted to break the agreement and seize the seal. A few words were exchanged, and they had fallen upon one another in a killing frenzy.
And by now the outcome of the three-faction melee was finally becoming clear: the third, Duan Rushan, always the weakest in cultivation, had through his formidable resources gradually gained the upper hand over Fan Xiong and Cheng Wuya.
At this moment, apart from the fewer than ten men still standing behind the two—Baodu Zi, the Old Bloodsucking Demon, the Old Ancestor Duanmu, and a handful of others—they had no chips left to play.
Duan Rushan, by contrast, not only had the Four Elders of the Venom Sect as his guard, but had at least a hundred men openly and secretly, many of them experts. Fully sixty percent of the Ten Thousand Venoms Sect's long-standing strength was now in Duan Rushan's hands—more than before the fighting began, which was truly beyond their expectations.