Chapter 400: Amid the Rain Curtain |
The local fox named Ling Long said a single sentence that plunged everyone into silence, and even Immortal Yuan Hao, who had seen storms and waves aplenty in his long life, went momentarily blank. After who knew how long, Irene, following a reflex more than a decision, poked Foxy’s tail beside her. Only when a loud crackle snapped from the fur did the eerie stillness finally break.
Foxy recoiled with her tail and came to herself, saying with a wince as she pulled away: “Hey, stop shocking me.” [Usually she was the one full of static zapping others, and now she had finally been the one zapped.] She turned and stared into Ling Long’s eyes, asking: “Did you just say that immortal was called Yun Qing Zi?”
Ling Long, startled by everyone’s reaction and not knowing what she had stepped on, thought she must have misspoken. She said, nervous and unsure: “Yes, that is what he said. My great-uncle and I both heard it.”
Irene raised her hand at once to stop her and showed a thoughtful look, saying: “Hang on, let us sort this out. You mean you and your great-uncle saw some visions and heard a voice. The voice said he was Yun Qing Zi and told you there was an ‘opportunity’ here, so the two of you came. Did he give any proof? You just believed him like that?”
When the little doll finished, Immortal Yuan Hao nodded, adding: “This truly invites doubt. On what basis did you trust what a vision told you? And in what circumstances did you see those visions?”
Ling Long’s expression turned dazed and bewildered, as if her own recollection suddenly filled her with suspicion. She sounded especially uncertain: “We… saw visions and heard the voice all of a sudden one day. A few days ago, I think? No, that is not right… I cannot remember clearly. I do not know why I believed it. Now that I think of it, it is very strange, but at the time my great-uncle and I set off without hesitation. I…”
As she spoke, her gaze grew more vacant, her will plainly wavering. Immortal Yuan Hao noticed at once and raised a hand with a point, saying: “Clear Spirit.”
His voice was not loud, but the two words seemed to carry supreme power. Countless layers of vast, rolling mantras, their sigils cryptic and interlaced, surged straight into Ling Long’s mind. With a muffled, illusory boom, the Jade-faced Golden Fox girl snapped out of that haze where her reason had been tainted, and the fog that seemed to have shrouded her heart for days was swept away. Her expression shifted several times, and the color of belated fear surfaced.
Watching those changes on her face, Immortal Yuan Hao knew his judgment had been correct.
Irene’s eyes went wide at that as she asked: “So you are saying those people in black are serving Yun Qing Zi because their minds were contaminated like this?”
“It is hard to say all of them, but at least some are,” Immortal Yuan Hao answered, his expression heavy as he turned his gaze to the red-clad girl before him. He asked: “Did you see Yun Qing Zi’s visions when you were at the Grand Void Spiritual Axis?”
“No, it was in Taiyou,” Ling Long replied quickly.
“Not much different. Taiyou is very close to the Grand Void Spiritual Axis,” Immortal Yuan Hao said with a nod. He asked again: “As for the exact time, you truly cannot recall?”
“I cannot. Thinking back, these past days all feel blurry. I spoke and acted like normal, but it did not feel like something I experienced myself.” Ling Long scratched beneath her ear, still trying to recall. Then she pressed her lips together and said: “Oh, I think I remember something. My great-uncle and I were watching the news. I remember a bulletin popped up saying that Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain had temporarily sealed its Mountain-Protection Array due to a large-scale mechanism failure.”
Zheng Zhi, who had been quietly listening, was the first to react: “Was that when the Demon Suppression Tower had an incident?”
“Yes,” Immortal Yuan Hao said, and his expression suggested many pieces had fallen into place. “In that case, matters line up with each other.”
Ling Long blinked, still a bit at sea.
So Immortal Yuan Hao explained what had transpired these days at the Grand Void Spiritual Axis, in Taiyou, and Otherworld. He omitted anything involving the internal secrets of the Demon Suppression Tower and spoke only of what could be shared publicly.
The more Ling Long heard, the more shocked she became. By the end she finally realized something and stared blankly at Immortal Yuan Hao, asking: “Wait, who… are you people?”
“You finally remembered to ask,” Immortal Yuan Hao said, a hint of a smile on his face as he pointed to himself and answered: “Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, Yuan Hao.”
Ling Long blinked, trying hard to remember who “Yuan Hao” was.
It took her a good thirty seconds to recall that Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain probably, maybe, seemed to have a head of sect.
“Oh.” The local fox clapped her hands in sudden understanding, then simply flipped her eyes and fainted.
Irene sprang up, shouting: “Hey, this fox passed out.”
The scene turned chaotic at once. Foxy hurried to catch the collapsing Ling Long, Immortal Yuan Hao pulled a spiritual pill from his sleeve that he had brought from Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, and Irene muttered as she waved her hand: “Why bother with that,” then bounced onto Ling Long and, crackling all over, raised her hand and shocked her. The Jade-faced Golden Fox, who would have woken up with a light faint, was instead electrocuted into deep unconsciousness.
In an instant the place grew lively as a construction site, full of the Hotel’s usual bustling atmosphere.
Yet amid all the commotion, Luna stood quietly in the corner, like a graceful doll statue watching the unbroken veils of rain beyond the old factory. No one knew what churned in the depths of her cold steel body. After a long moment, she seemed to sense something and raised her head to look toward a point in the air.
…
Yu Sheng rose from a muddled darkness. As he was about to return to the living world, he opened his eyes, and at the boundary between life and death he saw it was pouring on the frontier of the Soul Wilderness.
A blonde girl in gleaming armor stood in the rain with her twelve knights, waiting for him.
Yu Sheng smiled and said as his figure took shape in an instant, descending onto the plain and walking toward Luna and her order of knights: “You are here to greet me again?”
Luna spoke in a rapid patter the moment they met: “The little short one is far too noisy. She makes a fuss about everything. When you are not around no one can rein her in. I figured it would be better to come here and wait with the knights. I am in standby ‘outside.’ Irene has zapped that local fox unconscious, and then she panicked and started hollering while no one dared get near. Irene is releasing electricity all over. Foxy touched her and yowled.”
Yu Sheng waved his hands quickly and said: “Hold on, slow down. I am not used to you talking this fast.” He had grown accustomed to Luna’s pace of squeezing out three words in ten seconds, so every time he met her on this plain he needed a moment to adjust. He asked: “What do you mean she zapped the local fox unconscious? What is with the full-body discharge? What is happening outside? And why is it raining like this here? You know I died a bit suddenly this time.”
Luna considered, and although she had wanted to say that Yu Sheng died quite suddenly most of the time, she remembered that he had died by her own hands twice and did not have the heart to say it. She cleared her throat, a little awkward, and said: “The battle outside is over. That Hermitage Order Priest is dead.”
Yu Sheng, calm a second before, was startled: “What? Dead? That opponent was so difficult to deal with. Did Immortal Yuan Hao make a move?”
Luna spread her hands and said: “Irene killed him.”
Yu Sheng’s expression went vacant: “What?”
“It is complicated. I did not understand it clearly. Right after you abruptly died, she was struck by lightning too, for about half a minute. She charged herself to full,” Luna said expressionlessly, with the detached calm of one who had fully adapted to the Hotel’s pace of life. “Then she fired a beam cannon about two meters across at that Hermitage Order Priest. It happened so suddenly that she did not have time to hold back and no one else reacted either. When it was done, the scene was very clean. We did not find the enemy’s corpse.”
Yu Sheng thought for a moment and began: “Is there a chance that…”
Before he could finish, Luna shook her head and said: “No.”
Yu Sheng stared for two seconds and sighed long: “It seems there is no survivor. Still, we cannot demand too much. Winning is good, since he was a thorny enemy.”
Luna nodded, then lifted her gaze to the rain that kept falling over the plain.
She said: “The rain started just now when you ‘died.’ I thought you would know what it is.”
“So that is how it is,” Yu Sheng murmured, then raised his hand to touch the raindrops falling from the sky, his expression thoughtful.
The rain touched his palm with a brief chill yet left no moisture. The grasses bent and swayed under the rain, their leaves soaked again and again, only to dry an instant later, while the gray-black earth beneath remained free of any mud.
This rain was like a vision falling across dimensions, yet not wholly an illusion. It interacted with the plain, but its interaction was limited and fleeting.
Yu Sheng frowned. From the rain that kept falling, he sensed a kind of information.
He said softly: “Is this part of Sentinel Silence?”
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation