Chapter 10 — The Black Tide of the Barren Night Swallows the Ruined City

Cold sweat rolled down Senior Brother Qu's forehead, and his voice was hoarse as he said, "No wonder these treasures have lain here all this time without anyone taking them away. Junior Sister Qing, these treasures have grown sentient. Unless one is their rightful master, they will turn on one and bring harm instead!" Senior Sister Qing was horrified and nodded hastily. Shen Mu said coldly, "These treasures have lain here all along, and no one has ever dared to take them—not even the strange beasts. That means danger lurks here. You knew there was danger, yet you let your own junior brother risk himself. Your heart is poisoned. You are the true fiend!" "The fiend is trying to poison hearts again!" Senior Brother Qu's face was full of a grief so sharp it threatened to break him; he shook his head and said, "How could you ever understand the bond between fellow disciples? A little fiend is a little fiend. Measure my heart with a fiend's heart, and of course you find a fiend's heart in mine. I will not argue with you now. When dawn comes, I will send you on your way." Shen Mu frowned. This Senior Brother Qu was treacherous and cruel, ruthless enough to use even his own junior brother; he would certainly never let Shen Mu leave alive. But the man was, confoundingly, extremely powerful—Shen Mu was nowhere near a match for him—and Senior Sister Qing at his side was no less formidable. Then suddenly the earth lurched, throwing the whole ruin into violent motion. Muffled roars rose from strange beasts, and the beasts inside the ruins trembled and shrank backward, staring in desperate panic at the gate of the ruins, their demeanor one of utter terror. "What are these beasts afraid of?" Shen Mu had barely thought this when an indescribably thick darkness came flooding out of the tall gate like a tide! Shen Mu's heart jolted. He saw that the gate seemed to have an invisible barrier holding the darkness back, while the darkness hurled itself madly against the barrier, trying to smash through its blockade! The barrier over the gate buckled and twisted under the onslaught, but it never broke; and the darkness warped with the barrier's warping—now like a row of sharp claws, now like smoke drawn taut by the wind, now like countless spikes, changing through ten thousand forms. Then, abruptly, the darkness stopped its attack, and the invisible barrier over the gate also fell still. After a moment the barrier slowly bulged, pushed backward and stretched farther and farther. The darkness pressed the gate's barrier into the shape of a face—a colossal face, its forehead against the sky above the gorge, its chin against the ground. Every strange beast in the ruins lay flat on the ground, not daring to move, not daring to lift its head to gaze at that face. The face had three eyes of pure black; at the sight of those three eyes, Shen Mu's whole body turned cold, as if his soul were about to be sucked into the darkness. Then the face opened its mouth, and a low, droning voice spoke a language no one understood. "Qikeduo, Suomoye, Banruo banruo suomoye, Qikeduo banruo suomoye..." The droning voice seemed to be countless voices kneaded into one, charged with uncanny power. It made the ground of the ruins tremble without cease, shook the palace until its walls flaked, its stone pillars collapsed, and its cracks and fissures widened ever further. Even the gate itself was trembling, shedding bits of stone in pattering streams, clearly unable to hold out much longer. At that same moment, a dazzling light blazed up in the square. The pearl in the skeleton leader's hand bloomed with light, brighter and brighter. Shen Mu whipped his head around to look, and saw the Xiapo Heavenly Pearl rising into the air, its brilliance like sunset clouds, its rainbow colors almost viscous. The viscous rosy light settled over the two hundred-odd skeletons in the square, and one by one the skeletons suddenly became alive in that glow. Shen Mu was utterly stunned. The skeletons in the rosy light were skeletons no longer, but living, breathing girls! Girls with rosy cheeks and crimson lips, in garments that outshone fire! The girls sat in the square, and at their head was also a woman, one hand holding up the pearl as it rose ever higher. From the girls' mouths came a strange language, just as obscure and impossible to understand. "Yi po xiu po sa nan jun he xi, Guan ming duan jing wu si jiang you..." The voice in the darkness gradually grew louder and more immense, shaking the gorge. Darkness invaded the ruins from all directions, while the girls' voices grew clearer and more resounding in turn, and the light from the pearl burst outward in wave after wave, dispelling the darkness like smoke. The two voices were like the voices of a god and a fiend, ceaselessly clashing—now one overpowered the other, now the reverse—while darkness and light collided and fought without end. It was a battle, a duel beyond all imagining, and it shook Shen Mu's soul. Although he had lived all his life in the Barrens, he had never seen anything so grotesque. "This voice..." Shen Mu was dazed. The girls' voices were somewhat like the voice of the god he had heard when he assailed the spirit-embryo wall; they shared the same cadence. Dimly, he sensed that although the words differed, their inner meaning seemed the same. When he had tried to break the wall with primordial qi, he had heard, as through a haze, a voice that seemed to come from beyond the Nine Heavens—sacred, solemn; whenever that voice sounded, his primordial qi retreated involuntarily and could not split the wall. The two voices were still locked in fierce struggle, each gaining and losing ground in turn, but neither could entirely crush the other. The voice in the darkness, with its fiendish character, was strong and dreadful, while the girls' voices carried a divine character—clear, pleasing, tenacious, and holy. Whenever the fiendish voice gained an overwhelming advantage, they would suddenly surge forth and break the fiend's sound. And the fiendish voice, whenever it had spent all its advantage and sunk to the depths, would burst out anew like the Milky Way cascading backward, like a flood exploding through a levee—vast and exultant, fully and freely expressed. Each of the two voices had its own subtlety, its own extraordinary mastery. Shen Mu listened, spellbound, then suddenly gave a start and could not help growing excited: "The fiendish sound and the divine sound are attacking each other. This divine sound resembles the one that blocks me from breaking through the wall. Can I use the fiendish sound to break the divine sound that blocks me?" His excitement mounted. This was definitely a good idea! If he could just learn that fiendish sound, then when he tried to break the wall and the divine sound rang out, he could chant it to hold off the sound from beyond the Nine Heavens and let his primordial qi smash through the spirit-embryo wall! Once the wall was broken, with his Overlord Body and his Mystic Body Three-Pellet Art, he would no longer need to fear this Senior Brother Qu or Senior Sister Qing! But at that thought he froze, as though a basin of cold water had been dashed through him. The voice from beyond the Nine Heavens was the voice of a god. If he used a fiend's voice to break a god's voice, did that not mean he was himself a fiend sealed away by a god? Could it be that Senior Brother Qu and Senior Sister Qing were right—that he really was the little fiend? "No, no!" Shen Mu shook his head. If he was a fiend, then didn't that mean all other possessors of the Overlord Body were fiends as well? Then why call it Overlord Body? Wouldn't Fiend Body have been more fitting? "Overlord Body or Fiend Body—break the wall first, and we'll settle the rest later!" He acted on the idea at once. First he went over and over the dark fiendish sound, memorizing and reciting it silently to himself—its tone, inflection, transitions, mood, syllables, and timbre—and