Chapter 216 — The Blood Array
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 4 of 6
"No matter what, I can't just sit here doing nothing, can I, Little Gray?" He seemed to be murmuring to himself, but Little Gray was itself lost in a daze and did not notice its master's words at all—and Ming Li did not much care. "Several times now, hope has appeared right before my eyes, and at the very last moment it all comes to nothing. But so long as Bi Li still lies there, I cannot give up hope—is that not so?" He gave a low, rueful laugh.
"I know what you are worried about. Don't fret—once I find a way to cure Bi Li, I will naturally demand your friend back from him." The monkey Little Gray's ears suddenly pricked up, and it gave two squeaks of "zhizhi." Ming Li smiled faintly, but the smile did not linger long on his face before it vanished again.
He stood at the door of Hades's stone chamber.
Beyond the heavy stone door sounded that voice he had come to know well. Hades sat upright in his chair, and for some reason his daughter's figure flitted through his mind.
A most complex tide of feeling was rising and falling in his breast.
The stone door opened, revealing Ming Li's figure.
"You've come," Hades said mildly.
"Yes," Ming Li said with a slow nod, his voice equally flat.
The two men fell silent, as though nothing ought ever to have happened between them.
After a moment Ming Li said, "There is a matter I wish to speak with you about." "Say it." Ming Li said calmly, "You have brought the sect's followers back here, and I have brought Taotie back to you. If there is nothing else of late, I wish to go out again, to see whether I can find a way to save Bi Li." Hades frowned and glanced at Ming Li. Just then, hurried footsteps sounded outside the door; the disciple who served as messenger came running up, and was about to speak in urgent haste when he suddenly saw Ming Li and Hades talking face to face, and could not help but start.
Hades quietly waved a hand at the man. The man hesitated a moment, bowed, and quietly withdrew. Hades's gaze slowly turned back to Ming Li; the young man still stood there quietly, and anywhere in the Demonic Sect, whoever it was, standing before Hades would surely be trembling with fear—only he seemed never to have been afraid.
Was this the man his daughter had given her heart to?
"Go, then," Hades said, and suddenly there seemed to be a note of weariness in his voice.
Ming Li nodded silently. Though both of them pretended that the exchange of blows not long ago had never happened, it was plain that the relations between them, never warm to begin with, had grown more distant still. He turned and walked out, but just as he was about to step over the threshold, his body suddenly paused.
An inexplicable, uncanny aura came from nowhere, as though he had of a sudden been plunged into an abyss filled with fathomless blood, where breath came hard and would not come at all; or as though a giant wave had in an instant swept over him, the reek of gore a disaster that drowned all, roaring violently in his ears.
Ming Li's expression changed!
But this uncanny aura, like a fleeting dream, vanished in an instant, and all around was quiet again, as it had been.
Hades's voice sounded slowly from behind him, flat and without a trace of feeling. "What is it?" Ming Li stood with his back to him for a moment, then said mildly, "Nothing." With that, he slowly walked away.
The stone door slowly closed behind him. When its teeth had meshed fully with the stone wall, Ming Li suddenly wheeled about with extraordinary speed, a gleam of keen light flashing in his eyes as he stared deeply at the stone door behind which Hades had vanished. His gaze was profound and unreadable, and in it there seemed to linger a trace of bewilderment.