Chapter 423 — The Last Echo in the Darkness

The Wasteland in the dark was both still and clamorous: still, for those who lacked the strength to hide themselves among its villages and ruins; but for anyone whose power was great enough, the Wasteland's night was clamorous beyond all measure. To walk the dark Wasteland was to see every manner of grotesque and uncanny sight, to meet with countless things strange and unfathomable, and, if fate allowed, to enter one wondrous world after another — though whether one could return alive was a question no one could answer. That night the Wasteland was especially beguiling.

The blizzard had just ceased; wherever there was light, thick clumps of snow could still be seen clinging to branch and leaf, a world clad in silver and wrapped in white. Then all at once the sky turned dazzlingly bright. Countless creatures of the Wasteland lifted their heads and looked up; the dark heavens had abruptly taken on many brilliant hues.

These were no ordinary radiance, but the light bursting forth from magnificent divine powers, cluster upon cluster, illuminating the dark. The darkness was as though it had substance: though pressed back by these lights, each time it retreated it surged forward again, filling in the blank spaces.

The lights shifted and changed, growing ever more bizarre; the creatures of the Wasteland saw stars racing, contending against one another in the sky, battling one another. The stars moved in a most peculiar fashion — eighteen stars in front, two behind.

The ones in front advanced, and the two behind harried them. Whenever those eighteen stars halted, ready to close in and crush them, the two would bolt west.

When the eighteen gave no chase, the two came back to harry them again. When the eighteen gave chase, the two fled with all their strength.

So it went, again and again; the eighteen were held up, unable to truly stretch out to full speed. Below, beside the campfire in the ruins, the Protector Elder looked up at this scene and felt a thread of hope rise in his heart once more.

The purpose of the Dark Demon Patriarch and Daoist Lingjing in doing this was to hold the gods of the High Heavens back, never to clash with them head-on; and if they played it that way, there might yet be hope of survival. Then, all at once, one star after another in the sky dimmed and vanished from the vault of heaven.

The Protector Elder's heart sank. That meant the gods of the High Heavens had hidden their traces, luring the Dark Demon Patriarch and Daoist Lingjing to come seeking them; the moment they came, they would fall into an encirclement. "Don't go.

.

. " Panic kindled in the Protector Elder's heart. He clutched his own collar as though he were gripping his own heart, staring fixedly at the two moving stars in the sky. "Don't go near them, don't go near!

Run—" The two stars moved, seeming to hesitate a little; then suddenly they too dimmed, giving off not the faintest light.

The sky turned dark again. They had all concealed their traces.

The corner of the Protector Elder's eye twitched; his heart pounded, each beat fiercer than the last, and his panic mounted.

Everyone was hiding their traces now, groping and searching in the dark, and this was the most perilous moment of all. The Dark Demon Patriarch and Daoist Lingjing had patience, but surely not as much as their opponents.

The other side could wait, and could leave; the Dark Demon Patriarch and Daoist Lingjing absolutely could not wait too long — they had to be certain whether the enemy had gone.

At last a point of starlight kindled — a single star alone gave off light. The next instant the sky boiled.

Divine powers of every strange and outlandish kind erupted in a flash and drowned that star: flying dragons and flying phoenixes, bell towers and cauldrons and pagodas, shapes of every wonder, blindingly bright.

As these powers burst forth, the dark sky gained yet more patches of light, and the darkness all around was swept clean in an instant; in the air one could faintly make out eighteen towering gods and demons, their faces now holy, now ferocious, their limbs mighty, lit by the glow of the divine powers, on which all manner of runes and veins surfaced.

Caught within their assault was Daoist Lingjing. The Dark Demon Patriarch was not among them. "Daoist Lingjing is the bait! " The Protector Elder was shaken to the core.

As bait, Daoist Lingjing was surely doomed; no one could survive the combined assault of eighteen gods and demons.

Daoist Lingjing's purpose was to sacrifice himself in order to draw out the eighteen deities of the High Heavens. And those eighteen deities were drawn out in order to give the Dark Demon Patriarch a chance to strike them unawares.

Daoist Lingjing was immensely powerful, a man who had dominated an age, who had even dared to contend with Li Zheng for the title of finest under heaven — he had only lost, and forfeited a single finger. Yet in the art of the sneak attack, he was useless. The Dark Demon Cult's teleporting robe and teleporting banner were the finest means of ambush; he would draw out the eighteen deities, the Dark Demon Patriarch would seize the moment to strike, and there was a chance of wounding them grievously. "The Eight Arts of Lingjing!

" A shout rang through the air, magnificent enough to shake the heart: "Never to be heard again!

" The Protector Elder looked up and saw Daoist Lingjing's final moment.

His Eight Arts of Lingjing were no inferior to Li Zheng's Sword Diagram, yet before the attacks of eighteen deities they were of no avail. He was simply unleashing the supreme art he was proudest of, as a painter lays down ink with abandon and gives full play to his talent, as a man of letters writes with all the skill at his command — he wanted to leave his mark on this world, to leave his shadow behind.

At that same moment a great banner unfurled and rolled, and the Dark Demon Patriarch's form appeared behind those gods and demons, dealing them murderous blows.

The banner rolled; his form seemed to appear beside every deity at once, to strike every deity at once.

In a single turn he wounded more than ten of the gods and demons. Thunder crashed in the sky; by the time the sound of the divine powers' eruption reached the ground, no one could tell how many attacks had already passed.

The ripples of those powers made the air now warm, now piercingly cold; gusts of hurricane wind blew down from above, and in a moment ice and snow melted away, and in another moment all was ice and snow again.

The Dark Demon Patriarch's teleporting banner shattered, destroyed in the terrible surge of divine power — but he still had his teleporting robe. The Protector Elder looked up: blood rain was falling from the sky, a fine drizzle that gradually thickened.

Among those twenty stars forever moving in the heavens, one had dimmed; that star tottered, and then, in one violent collision, it went out and fell from the sky.

Daoist Lingjing was dead.

The Protector Elder grieved. Only the Dark Demon Patriarch remained, still fighting; even though he had mastered the Seven Chapters of Creation of the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Sutra, he could not change the outcome of this battle.

In the ruins, the Protector Elder did not raise his head to watch the battle in the sky. He stared fixedly at the flames beside the campfire, and unthinkingly fed firewood into the fire. The flames rose higher, the fire grew fiercer, yet he noticed nothing at all. "Why is this winter so cold.

. .

" Shivering with cold, he unknowingly kept adding wood: "What's wrong with this fire? However it burns, it's still so cold; however much wood I add, it's still so cold.

. . " In the sky another star dimmed; then suddenly that star blazed out again, so gorgeously that it lit the whole sky. "Creation gathers divine beauty; yin and yang cleave dusk and dawn!

" A cry that clove the darkness came to them, so rousing, so breathtaking.