荒墟牧神 - 第10章 荒夜黑潮吞遺城 - 雲海書庫

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