Chapter Eighty Three: Epitaph
Everyone’s attention gathered on Ding Ning. It should have been Zhan Moke in charge of the situation yet inexplicably, everyone felt the key was Ding Ning’s choice.
Ding Ning glanced at Wu Lianzi behind Zhan Moke and did not speak.
Zhan Moke looked coldly and confidently at him, saying, “You aren’t able to kill him.”
Ding Ning shook his head, kept looking at Wu Lianzi and said, “I did not mean that, I mean, he should know what he should do.”
Wu Lianzi understood the meaning of Ding Ning’s words. He felt that Ding Ning was right, so he did not hesitate. His vital energy immediately turned in a storm and rampaged through his body.
“Blood Kill!”
“Break City!”
“Heaven Light!”
Ding Ning kept on looking at Wu Lianzi but his left hand reached out like before as he stated three sword moves.
“You think you can kill him like this?”
Zhan Moke laughed coldly. The crescent blade once again appeared in front of him. Yet as the blade gave of powerful sword essence, the Peerless Wind and Rain Sword that had disappeared from the valley appeared again.
Fine raindrops spun furiously around him and Wu Lianzi. The terrifying power restrained all the vital energy inside of Wu Lianzi and it started to flow along the path that Zhan Moke wanted. Layers of rain form a curtained world and the power supporting these curtains came from Zhan Moke himself. This was likely the most powerful defensive sword essence in the world, like using countless worlds to separate oneself from this world.
When Li Xixing sensed this sword essence, he felt it was not possible to break through this sword essence to kill Wu Lianzi, yet as he unconsciously attacked following Ding Ning, he felt something was wrong. When the attacks from him, Hu Jingjing and Shen Xuan merged, their sword essences were not for killing but to protect.
With a boom, the completely rotten giant tree was first torn to pieces by the energy. Before the sword essence fully formed, Ding Ning’s both start to fly and fall towards the breaking giant tree.
Only now did Zhan Moke detect something was wrong and that Ding Ning’s goal was not Wu Lianzi.
He roared.
From the curtain made from layers of wind and rain, a line of rain fell towards Ding Ning with killing intent.
“Go!” Seeing this line of rain, Ding Ning spoke simply. He was talking to Li Xixing, Shen Xuan and Hu Jingjing.
He ignored the line of rain. In the next moment, his figure pa.s.sed through the pieces of the giant tree and disappeared into the well below.
Thud!
The line of rain flying at him seemed to hit an invisible and giant bell. As the bell rang out, the line of rain was shattered into thousands of fine lines, like a strange icy flower was blooming on a straight and transparent mirror.
Li Xixing, Shen Xuan and Hu were also falling towards the mouth of the well.
Zhan Moke’s face twisted slightly. His curved blade was about to fly out when he sensed a sword essence that had disappeared long ago and looked up into the sky. An enormous shadow was falling down.
The Sword Mountain Sword, embedded in the slope, was falling down. There was faint starlight flowing on this sword.
The Sword Mountain Sword carried Gu Huai’s true sword essence, and gave off terrifying presence and power. Yet the starlight carried some warmth that did not come from Zheng Xiu.
An enormous boom once again sounded in the world.
The downward moving curved blade suddenly turned up and met the Sword Mountain Sword. Like there were countless hot springs exploding inside the mountain wall, there were hundreds of explosions.
The heavy Sword Mountain Sword was pushed aside by his slash, and the shadow left him and Wu Lianzi. Zhan Moke grunted.
Wu Lianzi’s eyes flashed again with resolve. His vital energy started to flow again. Yet at the same time, Zhan Moke’s body reached him, and the other pointed at him.
Pang, pang, pang, pang ….
The vital energy that had just started to flow inside of Wu Lianzi’s body was forced out by Zhan Moke, and he even forced open many of the joints and sinews. Gasping in pain, Wu Lianzi’s eyes were furious but he was unable to fight back at all.
Zhan Moke shook slightly, and blood seeped from the corners of his mouth. He looked at the well opening where Ding Ning and the others had disappeared, and his anger was no less than Wu Lianzi’s.
He had forcibly twisted sword essence, and when his energy was already agitated, he had stopped Wu Lianzi from committing suicide. As a result, he received some internal injury.
In that brief moment of time, Ding Ning seemed to have just said one thing to Wu Lianzi yet he misunderstood Ding Ning was injured instead.
To direct three swords to fend off his attack and then use the Sword Mountain Sword … including the faint starlight on the sword, all of this contained many heart-stopping possibilities. Even more importantly, all this, including his injury, seemed to have been within Ding Ning’s calculations from the start.
The stairs down the well were not long. After just a dozen breaths, the stone stairs disappeared in front of Ding Ning and the others who had leapt after him.
They were not Tianliang descendants like Zhan Moke, so they only had speculations about everything here. But in their imagination, especially for something like Li Xixing who had partic.i.p.ated in the Min Mountain Sword Trials, underneath here might be a secret world like the Min Mountain Sword Trials, a vast and large world.
Unexpectedly, what appeared in front of them was a crypt that they could see the walls of with their eyes. This seemed like an underground training field that sects dug out for their members, and was just hundreds of feet in diameter.
The things they saw were extremely simple. A simple black stele, a flowing spring, and behind the spring, a gold tower. The black stele looked like it was made from stone, a kind of black agate. It was about the height of a person, and covered in characters. The spring behind the black stele was milky-white. To their shock, the spring gave off dense spirit energy. In Li Xixing and Hu Jingjing’s senses, it was the same as the Fountain of Eternal Life at the base of the Mountain of Ancestors!
The gold tower behind the spring was the most visible, about three times a man was tall. It did not look bright. Yet while there was no other light source in this underground room, there was no difference in brightness.
All of the light seemed to come from this seemingly ordinary gold tower made from pure gold.
**
The simple scene and the unusualness of these items formed an indescribable conflict.
Hu Jingjing took several moments to recover her regular breathing. Her gaze fell onto the milky white spring and she could not help but say, “Is that the Fountain of Eternal Life?”
No one answered her.
Li Xixing turned to glance behind him. “If he wanted to come down, he would have already done so.”
Ding Ning shook his head and asked, “Do you know these characters?”
In front of them, only that black stele had writing, so Ding Ning was naturally asking whether Li Xixing knew the characters on the stele.
Li Xixing took a deep breath and focused on the stele closest to him. He nodded after a moment of silence and said, “This looks like the writing of the present Wuzhi, except there are more strokes. But I can figure out most of the meanings.”
“Then it is about the same as I thought. This must be the words of the past Tianliang, and the Tianliang language must be the precursor to the Wuzhi writing.” Ding Ning nodded calmly. “What is written here?”
Ding Ning stood motionlessly on his spot so Li Xixing, Hu Jingjing and Shen Xuan naturally stood unmoving at their spots.
The simpler the things in here were, the most danger they could contain, especially when Zhan Moke did not immediately follow.
So Li Xixing did not immediately answer. He carefully read all the characters on the black stele again and then said slowly, “This records the true history of the Tianliang disaster and the Tianliang ancestral lands … The basics are about the same as Zhan Moke said, but the one who put up this stele is the leader of the rebels, the Peerless Wind and Rain Sword. He writes here that this elixir of life is something evil from s.p.a.ce. It came down with a demon star. Anyone who touches the elixir will be invaded by evil beings, their minds taken over, and they will become walking corpses. That evil thing from s.p.a.ce can absorb all primal energies of the universe. Metal, water, fire and other things cannot damage it. So he could only try to seal it up in the gold tower. He turned into a tree to be the guard, and begs everyone who pa.s.sed by him to never open the tower after reading this. Otherwise, there will be a great disaster.”