荒墟牧神 - 第10章 荒夜黑潮吞遺城 - 雲海書庫

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