Chapter 136 — The Girl
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
These pale golden metal plates first appeared in the First Era of Exploration, a remote age tens of thousands of years past, and the true formation—or rather birth—of the eternal stone tablet could only be older still. In other words, before mortals had established civilization upon this land, the gods recorded on the eternal stone tablet were already utterly dead!
So then what was the white star that descended from the heavens in the druids' collective hallucination three thousand years ago? Had the long-cold nature gods gotten up and died a second time?
……
While Gao Yang sat facing the eternal stone tablet fragment, sunk in thought, in a forest far from the Dark Mountains and the Leslie territory, great clusters of vines suddenly burst from the earth and twisted, swelling into an enormous cyst. A moment later the cyst ruptured, and a staggering figure crawled out from within.
The figure was draped in a black robe already torn to strips, brown short hair plastered in disarray against his scalp, gaunt and pale, his eyes gloomy. His entire right arm had been blown off at the root, and that terrible wound was now covered by a writhing mass of flesh and blood undergoing a laborious regeneration.
This was none other than the cultist of the Fellowship of the End of All Things who had narrowly escaped death from Tamsang Town.
The grievous bodily injury, the spiritual exhaustion, and the long distance of his flight had all reduced this middle-aged man—once deserving of the name of a strongman—to utter frailty. He moved unsteadily among the trees, and with his every step the shrubs and weeds he brushed past withered and rotted away, as though their life force had been drawn out of thin air, dying in the blink of an eye.
Having absorbed the vitality of these plants, some color finally returned to the middle-aged man's face. He halted before a large boulder and looked down at the symbol carved into the stone with a sharp instrument: a cluster of withered, curling thorns.
Recognizing the mark of the Fellowship of the End of All Things, the middle-aged cultist fished a wooden whistle from his bosom with his remaining left hand. But before he could blow it, he heard the rustle of leaves all around him; a great mass of fallen leaves was swept up by a fierce wind and coalesced atop the boulder into a hazy figure. When the leaves dispersed, the figure gradually grew distinct: a tall woman with long dark-green hair, fair-skinned and fine-featured, dressed in garments resembling a high priest's robe—yet all sacred religious symbols had been erased from the robe, and from its hem there emerged not human feet but a mass of dreadful "limbs" like the roots of a tree.
"A shameful failure, Mr. Bard," said the tall woman with the dark-green hair. Her voice seemed mingled with the noise of dry leaves crumbling. "Facts have proven that your self-assurance was blind."
"Gao Yang Cecil truly has succeeded in resurrecting, and he intervened and sabotaged my operation," said the middle-aged cultist called "Bard." Respectful though he was, there was nothing timid or servile about him; he straightened up and explained, "Lady Beiyila, his strength exceeded all estimates. I even suspect he has lost none of his combat experience!"
"If he were truly as powerful as in those years, you would never have had time to draw a second breath after laying eyes on him," the tall woman called Beiyila said bluntly—but then her tone shifted. "Still, the ease with which he defeated you proves that he is indeed not as weakened as I first imagined..."
"How can that be?" Bard's voice was full of bewilderment. "Was it not said that his soul had already been annihilated—that even if his body remained and was resurrected, he would become a cripple, or even a living dead man?"