Chapter 239 — The Older One Grows, the More Absurd

At the end of the forest the Blind Elder sat grim-faced, resting on his staff, while the Butcher swung his blade. Around them the spaces lay in stacked, shifting layers, most strange: folded spaces, and with every shift the scenery about them changed as well — now a vast forest, now a scorching desert, now waves towering to the sky, now a whole firmament of stars rushing at their faces.

With every shift a different forbidden art erupted; the divine prohibitions hidden in those spaces unleashed their power, and the Butcher had to hold his ground against the prohibitions that burst forth without warning.

The Butcher raged, "Blind Elder, Granny, my back is about to break. Are you two rested yet?"

The Blind Elder sighed. "I am old. My bones are not what they were. Let me rest a while longer."

"I am no younger than you!"

The Butcher fumed, "And my lower half was only just sewn back on and has not set firm yet! Make me fight any longer and I will show you my top half and my bottom half parting ways!"

The Blind Elder said unhurriedly, "Granny is young. Let her take a turn."

From Granny Zhu's mouth came an aged voice, sneering, "Strong as this old man may be, the lady's body can bear no more. My lady, yield your body to me..."

"Get out of here!" Granny Zhu snapped.

The Butcher's and the Blind Elder's faces turned strange. Granny Zhu's illness was growing graver by the day; ever since she had found them, they had met with danger again and again, and Fan Xuanshu kept leaping out to seize control of Granny Zhu's flesh.

"The demon seed grows stronger and stronger. I fear it is only a matter of time before Old Dame Si is replaced by Fan Xuanshu."

The space about them shifted as though a god were casting dice, each face of the die a different divine prohibition, and they were inside the die: whichever face came up, that face's prohibition would erupt. Only this die had not six faces but one hundred and eight.

This time it came up stars. The ground vanished from beneath their feet, and they found themselves in a boundless starry void, nothing above, nothing below.

Those glittering stars were no true stars but mirrors, mirror upon mirror blazing with light; suddenly countless beams of mirrored light gathered into one and, with a hum, came shining down upon them.

The Butcher roared, and with the vast single-line-of-sky stroke, one blade cleaving the road between life and death, he split that dreadful divine light apart. The severed light went howling past before them and behind them, and only the ground where they stood remained more or less safe.

Granny Zhu called out in alarm, "Deaf Elder, Deaf Elder, come over here, quickly!"

On the far side of the starry void the Deaf Elder was wielding his brush like flying, holding his own against the host of stars. The Blind Elder said, "The Deaf Elder cannot hear your voice..."

Before his words had died away, the Deaf Elder made to fly toward them, only to be struck by a beam of starlight; the light blasted him away, and no one knew where he had gone.

"Butcher, take a rest. My turn!" Fan Xuanshu's voice came from Granny Zhu's mouth.

The Butcher at once stepped back. Granny Zhu came forward, circulating the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Scripture, watching the shifting spaces warily.

Trapped inside this space-folding prohibition were not only the three of them, but also the Deaf Elder, Lord Huo and the Lame Elder — though each was caught on a different face of the die, and it was hard for them to come together.

When Granny Zhu had arrived here and seen the Blind Elder and the others trapped, she had tried to break the spell, only to be caught in it herself. Later the Deaf Elder had tracked them down and tried to undo the space prohibition too, and he had been swallowed up as well.

"This space prohibition holds one hundred and eight faces of divine bans, and the axis of the formation's workings is not among those one hundred and eight faces."

The Blind Elder rose to his feet, his Heart-Sage Pupil clear as a mirror, and gazed all around. "We are inside the god's die. Lord Huo and the Lame Elder are on another face, and sometimes they are thrown together onto ours; the Deaf Elder too is knocked into this small plane from time to time. It means this space prohibition has run too long, and its mathematical reckoning has begun to drift."

He calculated in his head, deducing over and over, then suddenly his brows rose. "That god who laid down this space prohibition, when reckoning the decimals, only computed to the instant beyond the decimal point — he never counted the smallest number! Run this prohibition a while longer and it will collapse of itself!"

The space prohibition shifted into a volcano: divine fire like dragons, lightning and thunder. Granny Zhu fought against it with all her strength, and Fan Xuanshu's voice came from her mouth: "Then how long must this prohibition run before it collapses of itself?"

The Blind Elder reckoned a while and said, "In twenty-four thousand years."

"Shut your mouth, Blind Elder!" bellowed the Butcher, who itched to split him in two with a single stroke.

Just then a voice came from outside: "Boy, your elders are trapped in there. Six of them."

Inside the space prohibition everyone started and looked out, but saw nothing at all.

The Blind Elder, frantic with worry, cried sternly, "Shen'er, do not come in! You cannot withstand the power of the divine prohibition at all!"

Shen Mu's voice came from outside: "Demon King, is there a way for you to break the spell and get them out?"

"This kind of space prohibition uses the esoteric art of the space matrix. It folds one hundred and nine spaces and divides them into one hundred and eight spatial cross-sections. It looks like only one hundred and eight, but in truth there are one hundred and nine."

The voice came from outside: "But the god who laid down this space matrix esoteric art, to save himself trouble, did not compute to the infinite decimals, and left a few flaws behind. When the art has run twenty-four thousand years it will dissolve on its own. Still, if we can find the one hundred and ninth space, breaking it will not be hard. Wait a moment — let me reckon..."

Inside the space prohibition, Granny Zhu, the Butcher and the rest looked at one another. "This man at Shen'er's side is remarkable. He saw through the mystery of the prohibition at a glance — far more reliable than the Blind Elder."

After a moment the voice came again: "Do you have some treasure you have no use for? Something sturdy. I will throw it in, throw it into the one hundred and ninth space. With this sturdy thing added to the one hundred and ninth space, when it turns it will be like an extra gear jammed among the gears — it locks fast of itself, and the formation undoes itself."

Shen Mu's voice came: "I picked this up in Loulan's Golden Palace. Will it serve?"

"Eh, this treasure is not bad at all. To pick up such a thing at random — what luck. No wonder I can never reckon you out. Your luck defies heaven; it is not that I am incompetent."

...

Even as they spoke, Granny Zhu and the others saw a pearl fly past in front of them. The pearl grew larger and larger; within it were mountains and waters, like a whole world entire, ranges towering, waterfalls flowing on and on.

The pearl streaked across the sky before them, and now it had become a colossal thing, a round heaven holding mountains and rivers within it, and then it vanished beyond the sky.

"Be careful, all of you. Breaking this prohibition will be a bit violent," the voice outside went on.

The words had scarcely fallen when a violent tremor came surging up from the depths of space; layer upon layer of space collapsed, earth, water, wind and fire raging in madness, sweeping away all things, and the power of the divine bans in those layers broke down, terrible energies gushing out on every side!