荒墟牧神 - 第8章 婆婆留下的換形皮 - 雲海書庫

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