Chapter 497 — Erecting a Stele and Inscribing Words

Time swept the mountains and rivers and the earth itself clean, carried away the people of the past, and left behind only history—remembered, or forgotten.

The years are like a song, and that song must be bleak and mournful.

Shen Mu stood atop the chest, embracing that girl. Sunlight poured down like the years themselves, and at the moment the light fell upon him, the maiden in his arms turned to flying sand and streamed backward with the receding darkness.

The sunlight was clear and pure, scattering over the glittering yellow sands of the great desert, glinting off the scale-like dunes. This place had once been a valley; the hills around it were not tall, yet they had been green and fair, with clear water running.

But the years had woven past and left nothing here but sand filling the sky.

Shen Mu jumped down from the chest. Though he had known it would be so, he still could not hide the melancholy in his heart.

The chest opened its lid and tossed Long Qilin out. The great chest seemed puzzled too: a moment ago there had been several hundred people in its belly—how had they vanished so suddenly?

Long Qilin was frightened and uneasy as well. He had always been superstitious and terribly afraid of ghosts, and now he was so terrified that he buried his head in the sand.

Shen Mu looked up. Before him stood a bare cliff, standing alone amid the desert sands. Through tens of thousands of years of dust and sandstorms it had never weathered, never crumbled.

On the cliff face were characters he had left there tens of thousands of years ago.

"Human life is greater than Heaven!"

Shen Mu was stunned. He had, after all, left something of himself in history.

All of last night had been no afterglow of history, nor any dream. He could not explain the wondrous experience of that night, could not explain why he had returned to thirty or forty thousand years ago, why he had undergone a dark invasion alongside the people of Bailong City.

Nor could he explain why he had come back to the present, why the Shanghuang era had vanished after the darkness passed.

And yet all of it had truly happened!

He had fought shoulder to shoulder with people from tens of thousands of years ago, watched them cast away their heads and spill their hot blood, watched the suffering the people of history had endured—and he had seen the slaughter and devastation wrought when another Heavenly Court went to destroy the Heavenly Court of the Shanghuang era!

"The Shanghuang era was destroyed, and the Kaihuang era was destroyed too. Was the Heavenly Court that destroyed both eras the same Heavenly Court?"

He had his guesses, but no proof to confirm them.

"Perhaps the one that means to destroy Jingping is that same Heavenly Court as well? Where do they come from?"

From beneath the chest, Ban Gongcuo slipped out without a sound. He raised his head and looked at that lone cliff in the desert, studied the characters upon it, and said unhurriedly, "Hierarch Shen, you must be feeling very lost now, very desolate. That girl of the Bai family may have liked you, and you may have liked her very much too—only she knew she was to part from you, and so she never said it aloud. Time is so heartless..."

His eyes flickered. Behind him the gourd opened silently, and one after another, orbs of blood floated up without a sound.

Ban Gongcuo stared fixedly at Shen Mu's back. The blood orbs in the air writhed like venomous snakes, and his voice was like a venomous snake too, boring into Shen Mu's heart, gnawing at his soul, ravaging his Dao heart, poisoning his Dao heart, making this youth show a flaw.

"If you had stayed in that era, perhaps your life would have turned out utterly different from now."

Ban Gongcuo quietly shifted his feet and adjusted his breath; his voice grew ever more seductive as he painted for Shen Mu a picture utterly unlike reality: "You might have fallen in love, might have had many children. You would have faced many setbacks and dangers, but your life would have been so rich and vivid! The past of history would have become brilliant colors, and you two, a young husband and wife, would have lived through those vivid, many-hued passages of history... What a pity."

Then he turned his words, and they became full of poison: "What a pity—you were parted after all, separated by tens of thousands of years. What love, what fondness, what future—across tens of thousands of years they all turned to yellow sand, turned to emptiness!"

He showed a strange smile, and his voice twisted along with it into something strange: "That girl of the Bai family very likely died long ago. After you left, she very likely died at the hands of her pursuers! Even if she escaped, she may well have married another, borne children, grown into an old woman—and only when she was aged and her beauty gone would she occasionally recall that youth who appeared so suddenly that night and cupped her face in his hands! Hierarch Shen—"

"Has there ever been desolation in your heart? Is that desolation gnawing at your soul, poisoning your spirit?"

Ban Gongcuo was drawing closer to him, his voice so strange it was like a demon king beyond the heavens whispering, luring a man to fall: "She died in the end, turned to dust. Thirty or forty thousand years—in this desolate desert, in the history buried away like dust and sand, no one but you, a man so full of feeling, remembers her at all. Just like that she drowned in the dust of history, buried in these rolling yellow sands."

He chuckled: "In youth I knew not the taste of sorrow, and loved to climb the tower, loved to climb the tower! Now I have known the taste of sorrow through and through, and would speak of it, yet hold back in shame—would speak of it, yet hold back in shame! Hierarch Shen, your heart is so fragile. Let me—"

He was just about to make his move when behind him Long Qilin's body grew larger and taller, and suddenly he raised his huge claw and swatted Ban Gongcuo to the ground with one blow.

Ban Gongcuo scrambled up in haste, and was knocked down again. Long Qilin slapped him down again and again, beating him until blood sprayed from his mouth, and raged, "That will teach you to wag your tongue! That will teach you!"

Ban Gongcuo flew into a rage: "You dead fat pig, do you think I am afraid of you?"

Long Qilin's claws suddenly rang with a clang, and blade-sharp talons sprang out, ready to slit him open and spill his guts.

Suddenly Shen Mu's calm voice came: "Fatty Long, no need to beat him anymore. Let him go."

Long Qilin was briefly taken aback, and said, puzzled, "Hierarch, this fellow is rotten to the core, and he is a first-rate hand at running for his life. Just now he was trying to do you harm! If we let him go, catching him again will be harder than hard!"

"We fought shoulder to shoulder. He also put out great effort to save people, risking his life. He deserves one chance to live."

Shen Mu stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at his own writing on the cliff, and said calmly, "Great Venerable, I will not kill you. Go. When next we meet, I will take your head."

Ban Gongcuo got up, brushed the sand from his clothes, his eyes flickering, and said, "Are you sure you are letting me go this time—no trick? You will not strike me down the moment I turn my back?"

Shen Mu said indifferently, "Too many died last night. Today I do not wish to kill."

Ban Gongcuo did not turn around; he retreated step by step, staring fixedly at Shen Mu's every move, thinking, "This time, though I went through dangers and fought to the death, I did not come away empty-handed either. At the very least I gained two divine legs... Wait. These two divine legs..."