Chapter 37 — Strange Eyes

Far behind them, the roar and clash of battle never ceased; lights flickered, and it was plain that the three from the Canglan Sect were locked in fierce combat with the other fiends in the darkness. Yet here, around Zhang Qingyue, all had suddenly fallen into an eerie quiet.

Zhang Qingyue stood dazed and lost in thought — but the masters of the yellow flying sword and the grey fangs had seen that grotesque spectacle with their own eyes, and they were too shocked to know what to do.

"Wild Dog, tell me I'm not seeing things. Jiang the Third was sucking men's blood — so how does it look like he's the one who got drained dry?"

Another voice, rough and gruff, came out of the dark: "Hell if I know. The Canglan Sect actually has someone who can practice the Bloodsucking **? Is this fellow a disciple of our own Immortal Sect or what?"

The first speaker spat. After a moment, though, he could find nothing to say, and snapped irritably, "No. This one's origin is too strange. We've got to get to the bottom of it!"

Two globes of light flared before Zhang Qingyue, gradually resolving into two figures. Zhang Qingyue came back to himself with a start, hastily cast aside his stray thoughts, and focused his mind on the enemy.

In the light, the yellow flying sword and the grey fangs flew back to their respective masters. The one on the left caught the sword — a tall, gaunt man with a thin face, a hooked nose, and small eyes in which black and white stood sharply apart, glinting with malice. The one beside him was stranger still. At first glance Zhang Qingyue was startled: the man was tall as well, but his appearance was bizarre — drooping eyelids, a jutting nose, ears that pointed upward, lips a vivid red, and a tongue that seemed remarkably long, darting out from time to time, so that he looked very much like a dog. The grey fang flew back into that man's hand, and Zhang Qingyue's first thought was instinctive: could this be the tooth of some great hound?

The man called Wild Dog saw that once Zhang Qingyue laid eyes on him he could not look away, and that his gaze was full of astonishment. Furious, he barked, "Hey! You little whelp, what are you staring at your Daoist Wild Dog for?"

"Daoist Wild Dog?" Zhang Qingyue frowned, and only then noticed that this dog-faced man was in fact wearing a pitch-black Daoist robe. So he belonged to the same faith as the Canglan Sect, it seemed — though who knew whether, traced back three thousand years, there might be some shared ancestry.

The man, who called himself the Wild Wolf Daoist, saw Zhang Qingyue's open contempt and grew angrier still. "Whelp, I'm asking you how you killed the vampire!"

Zhang Qingyue blinked. "What vampire?"

The tall man beside him snapped, "The one on your back, that's who!"

Only then did Zhang Qingyue remember that he was still carrying the corpse. A cold, clammy sensation crept across the back of his neck. With a cry of alarm he sprang away and flung the body off. It hit the ground with a dull thud — the thing that had been a man was now no more than skin stretched over a skeleton. One look was enough to turn Zhang Qingyue's stomach; he twisted his face away.

The Wild Wolf Daoist and the tall man glanced at the skeleton, then at each other, and each read the same shock and suspicion in the other's eyes. The Bloodsucking ** was cruel and uncanny; formidable though it was, it did terrible damage to the practitioner's own body, and those who trained in it ceased to be quite human and were not quite ghosts either. Though these two were of the Devil Sect, they had always kept their distance from such arts — yet they knew a thing or two about this mysterious discipline.

And now the man lying dead on the ground before them, this vampire who was said to be the sole heir of the Bloodsucking **, had in the blink of an eye been drained of every drop of essence and blood. From what the two of them knew, such cultivation far surpassed that of the dead vampire, Jiang the Third; even the legendary Old Fiend of Bloodsucking, they suspected, might not command such power. Yet looking at this young man of the Qingyun Sect before them, there was no trace whatever of the sinister, warped aura that clung to practitioners of the Bloodsucking school.

The Wild Wolf Daoist eyed Zhang Qingyue. "Are you a disciple of the Old... the old senior of Bloodsucking?"

Zhang Qingyue was taken aback. "What old senior of Bloodsucking?"

The Wild Wolf Daoist's dog mouth opened, and his long tongue lolled out and curled around. Watching him, Zhang Qingyue could not help but think of Big Yellow, the great dog on Dazhu Peak back in the Canglan Mountains. But even as the thought crossed his mind, a shrill shriek came from somewhere behind the cavern, a flying sword flashed, and a figure in black came tumbling out of the darkness, his face streaked with blood. He struggled on the ground a few times, and it was plain he would not rise again.

Zhang Qingyue suddenly came to his senses. His fellow disciples were fighting for their lives, and here he stood chatting with these Devil Sect fiends — what a fool he was! At once he sprang up, meaning to go to their aid.

The Wild Wolf Daoist and the tall man saw Zhang Qingyue's body suddenly move, and both started, thinking he meant to attack without warning; they braced at once. But Zhang Qingyue had no sooner moved than he let out a strangled cry, his face contorting, and dropped back down, half-kneeling on the ground, gasping and hissing through his teeth, cold sweat beading on his forehead.

In his urgency, Zhang Qingyue had forgotten that the small dark-red fork was still lodged in the flesh of his shoulder. The instant he moved, pain knifed through him to the very marrow, and he dropped back down hard. The bleeding, which had briefly stopped, now welled up again from the torn wound.

Seeing such a golden opportunity, how could the Wild Wolf Daoist and the tall man let it pass? Better to kill and be wrong than to spare and regret. Malice kindled in their eyes, and the flying sword and the fangs in their hands began to glow once more.

But at that very moment a clear, ringing cry came from behind them. Amid the motley lights of the darkness, a blaze of dazzling blue suddenly flared — brilliant, resplendent, in an instant beating down every other gleam. Within the blue radiance, Tianxuan swept proudly from its sheath, and behind it, hanging in midair, stood Lu Xueqi, peerless in bearing, her robes whipping and streaming in the wind.

As the Wild Wolf Daoist and the tall man gaped, the divine sword Tianxuan's blue light surged, shaping itself into a colossal blade of blue that came crashing down into the darkness. At once a host of motley lights flew up to meet it, but the moment they touched that vast, pure blue they were annihilated into ash and smoke. Wild shrieks rang out; five or six figures sprang from the shadows. With a thunderous crash the blue blade struck the stone wall, sending rubble flying in a display of terrifying force. Nearly every one of the figures that had leapt out was wounded. At the same moment, Qi Hao's Frost Ice Sword flashed white and came charging in from the flank; wherever its sword-glow passed, several Devil Sect followers were frozen into blocks of ice. Zeng Shuyan, flying sword at speed, shattered them one by one.

The tall man before Zhang Qingyue and the Wild Wolf Daoist exchanged a glance, and at once abandoned Zhang Qingyue and charged forward, summoning the yellow flying sword and the grey fangs together to check the assault of Qi Hao and Zeng Shuyan.

Their cultivation was plainly a cut above the rest of the Devil Sect, and they checked Qi Hao and the others at once — yet inwardly both were crying out in distress.