Chapter 8 — The Shape-Shifting Skin Granny Left Behind

"Granny once said that if you lose your way among the Ruins and cannot get back to the village before dark, you must not panic." Shen Mu steadied himself and thought: "There are many relics in the Ruins, and most of them are places of strange power. Hiding in a relic might well save my life. Whether a relic can save you depends on two things. First, whether it holds stone statues like the ones in the village. Second, whether it holds a great host of strange beasts. Those beasts have spirit-knowledge; they know where the Gloom can be escaped..." There was no lack of relics in the Ruins. On his mad flight just now Shen Mu had glimpsed the ruins of walled towns and villages, broken walls and toppled pillars, very ancient; only he had no leisure to stop and see whether any of them held stone statues. The setting sun was already half-sunk behind the mountains when all at once a hush fell between heaven and earth, a hush so absolute it drove men mad. Then came a whirring roar. Shen Mu looked up and saw great birds tearing across the sky in shrieking flocks, a black mass blotting out the heavens. Then the earth shook, the woods toppled, and strange beasts came burrowing up out of nowhere, sprinting away on frantic legs. He even saw the waters of a lake stir, and several great crimson fish, zhang upon zhang in length, leap clean out of the surface and run on fins used as legs, racing over dry land! Shen Mu was somewhat bewildered. Fish running over the land — were they still fish? "These beasts are all running the same way. There must be shelter there, somewhere the Gloom cannot reach!" His spirits blazed. He rushed forward alongside the beasts. The sky grew darker and darker, and far off the Gloom came surging in like a tide. That Gloom was not the same as night; it was like a great flood, pouring over the peaks, over the valleys, over the wildlands, drowning everything. Though this was not the first time Shen Mu had seen the Gloom invade, he still felt utterly shaken. The Gloom came on ferocious, and the herd still ran to meet it. Shen Mu hesitated: the direction the beasts were running was the very direction from which the Gloom came. Was there really safe ground ahead, a place to hide from the Gloom's assault? If there was not, would he not be dying with no grave to bury him? "Never mind! The Gloom comes too fast — even if I turned back it would be too late, I could never outrun it. There is nothing for it now but to run with the herd!" He clenched his teeth and charged madly forward. More than ten li downriver from Yincan Village, the battle between Granny Zhu and the Five Elders of the Lan River had reached its most critical moment. At first only four of the Lan River elders had been attacking Granny Zhu, but they could not overcome her, and so Qi Yanbing, chief of the Five Elders, who had been watching from the cliff, joined the fight. With five elders besieging her, they laid down the Five Elements Demon-Refining Formation. Yet, unexpectedly, Granny Zhu had barely held her own under the assault of four; when Qi Yanbing entered the field her strength surged instead. The Five Elements Demon-Refining Formation of the five elders could not even trap the old woman. The five were shocked and furious. Only then did they realize that the old hag had feigned weakness in order to take them all in one net, luring Qi Yanbing in so that he could not escape. Granny Zhu teetered on her small bound feet, flickering to and fro like a ghost. The silver needles and silk threads in her basket seemed to come alive, and in an instant they had covered the Five Elders of the Lan River in wounds, and thread after thread strung the five old men together, pinning soul and body alike so that they could not move. The little old woman, her face heaped with smiles, came forward with her scissors raised: "Granny hasn't refined human skin in a long while. I wonder if my hand has gone clumsy..." She came before Qi Yanbing, and suddenly he opened his mouth and a silver pellet flew out, striking straight at Granny Zhu. The pellet grew as it met the wind. With a swish, ten thousand sword-qi burst from it, ringing and swelling outward, and in an instant it was transformed into a sphere a hundred zhang across, a sphere of pure sword-light! Granny Zhu had not expected it. She retreated hastily, her body suddenly going soft, swimming up and down in the air like an earthworm to dodge the blades of light, while the scissors left her hand and flew out, like two silver dragons snapping and snipping, cutting each blade of sword-light in two. She had been caught off guard after all, and one blade of light stabbed through her — a blade that came from behind. She was hunchbacked, and there was a place on her back beyond her line of sight, and it was exactly there, on her hump, that the blade struck. The sword-light filled the sky and vanished. The broken blades clattered down out of the air, studding the ground for acres around. And the silver pellet dropped with a clack, and moved no more. Granny Zhu too came down on the ground, reached behind her and drew out that sword, and frowned slightly. "You dodged it after all..." In the eyes of Qi Yanbing, chief of the Five Elders, there was despair. His voice was hoarse: "I used the Myriad-Blade Sword Soul to strike you unawares at so close a distance. Within the Myriad-Blade Sword Soul are stored six thousand eight hundred and forty-two swords, and still you dodged them. You cannot be some nameless nobody of the demon path! Among the demon path there is no old woman who looks like you. Who are you?" He suddenly noticed her back. Where the hump had been pierced by the sword there was a wound, but no blood flowed from it; instead light shone in through it. It was plainly hollow inside. Qi Yanbing's hair stood on end: "This is not your true shape. You are wearing someone else's skin..." "You have wounded my skin-casing." Granny Zhu frowned, but the voice that came out was not her usual aged woman's voice. It was very pleasant to hear — hearing only that voice, one would surely think her a beautiful woman in the full bloom of her looks, not in the least like someone with half a foot in the coffin. Granny Zhu pressed at her throat, sighed, and muttered: "Losing air..." She took silk thread from her basket, stitched the sword wound on her back closed, and tried her voice. It had returned to normal. Suddenly Qi Yanbing's face changed as though he had seen a ghost. He blurted out: "I have heard your voice before — I know who you are! The wife of the sect master of the Dark Demon Sect..." Granny Zhu's face shifted slightly. She set her fingers on the silk threads that ran through the five, and the Five Elders of the Lan River were instantly sliced to pieces by the threads, flesh and blood scattered across the ground! Strangely enough, the silk threads took no stain of blood at all; rather, as though alive, they coiled themselves up, shrinking into a ball of thread that returned to the basket. Granny Zhu gave a snort and tittered: "Dead lame dotard, how long have you been here?" Not far behind her, the Lame Old Man came limping up on his staff, his face all smiles: "Just arrived, just arrived. Elder sister, I saw nothing and heard nothing." Granny Zhu shot him a glance and smiled sweetly: "It doesn't matter if you saw. So long as you heard nothing, all is well. Let us go back to the village." The Lame Old Man hesitated, then said: "Li Tianxing, sect master of the Dark Demon Sect, was a man of great wisdom and martial glory all his life, yet he did one foolish thing: in his late years he took a fancy to the most beautiful demon woman of the time, and so he deposed his original sect master's wife to marry her as the new one. The demon sect was in an uproar. On the very night of the wedding, in the bridal chamber, that new sect master's wife secretly poisoned Li Tianxing, ruined centuries of his cultivation, and made off with the sect's guardian demonic canon. The