Chapter 249 — Nine Tails
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 5
Xiao Hui had sensed something the moment the bed began to tremble, and had already leaped down. Lying low on the ground, eyes wide with wary astonishment, it watched until it saw a hidden door slide silently open in the stone wall. The monkey rose slowly and peered inside. All was pitch-black; nothing could be seen, and yet no fierce monster came charging out. To the bored monkey, that mysterious black opening now seemed to hold a certain allure, as though beckoning to it gently.
Xiao Hui scratched its head and glanced back. In the outer stone chamber, Ming Li and Master Gui had fallen into silence once more—clearly another long stretch of pondering lay ahead. The Three-Eyed Spirit Monkey turned back, suddenly grinned, pulled a face, then sprang lightly up and slipped into the black void of the hidden door; within moments its figure had vanished into the darkness.
A faint, fitful wind breathed out gently from the mysterious black opening in the stone wall.
Carrying a trace of something thin and bloody.
The instant it entered the hidden door in the rock, the third eye at the center of Xiao Hui's brow flickered with a faint golden gleam, giving off an eerie light; beneath that pale golden glow, the cave that had been utter darkness became dimly visible.
It was a passage barely tall enough for a single person—hard going for a man, but more than ample for a monkey. Xiao Hui pressed on through it with a certain thrill of adventure for a good while, then felt the ground suddenly drop away beneath its feet: the passage had turned downward.
As it descended deeper, the stone walls on either side of the passage gradually grew damp; in places, water droplets even pattered softly down in the darkness. In the utterly silent tunnel, only the monkey's figure moved slowly forward, while from the darkness ahead drifted, from time to time, a light wind tinged with that strange, faint smell of blood.
The downward passage was not steep, but it was long. Xiao Hui walked for a great while, by its reckoning deep into the belly of Mount Huqi. It was then that the monkey suddenly halted: somewhere far ahead, a faint red glow had kindled in the darkness.
The monkey stood in the passage a while, seemingly hesitant. After a moment it glanced back the way it had come and scratched its head, as though wondering whether it ought to return and tell its master. Yet that speck of red light ahead seemed to beckon, flickering softly.
At last, after two or three chirps, the monkey crept cautiously forward.
The closer it came to the red glow, the stronger the once-faint smell of blood in the passage grew, and Xiao Hui's expression turned steadily more tense; it stretched out its nose and sniffed the air, eyes full of uneasy doubt. But in the end, with the red gleam right before it, it pressed on.
At last it reached the red glow. It was, in fact, another mouth of the passage. Xiao Hui poked its head out and peered about, then sprang through. Moments later the monkey found itself on a broad way several times wider than the tunnel it had just left. Besides the passage it had come through, this broad way was joined by yet another tunnel, right beside the one Xiao Hui had leaped down from—but it was dark and murky, leading no one knew where. The other side of the broad way, by contrast, was brightly lit, utterly unlike the darkness of the passage, and especially where the red glow pulsed and flickered ceaselessly at the far end. Clearly this was the scene Xiao Hui had glimpsed from afar while still in the tunnel.