Chapter 73 — Assassination in Flower Lane
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
This night in Crimson Dragon City was destined to be clamorous beyond measure.
"Someone is following me.
" Shen Mu had no sooner walked out of the city lord's mansion than he sensed he was being tailed. The adepts of the mansion made no attempt whatsoever to hide themselves; they evidently saw no need to conceal their tracks from a minor martial artist like Shen Mu, and so they simply followed him out in the open. At this hour, decorated floats were parading through the city.
The merchants had built floats several dozen feet tall, fashioned in the shapes of enormous monstrous beasts and all manner of gods and demons, with dancing girls swaying atop them. The dancers were decked out in gaudy finery, their costumes the same as those of the stone idols in one village or another. Walking through Flower Street, Shen Mu felt as though he had wandered into a world where gods and demons danced in wild chaos. The street was a deafening roar of noise, packed from one side to the other with people, pressing and jostling against one another. Along both sides hung lanterns, and there were tall stone pillars topped with stone basins full of burning oil, blazing fiercely.
There were also stilt-walkers whose stilts stood over a hundred feet high, so that a single step could carry them sixty or seventy feet; each stilt-walker held a torch in one hand and a gourd of oil in the other, and after taking a mouthful of the oil would spray it at the torch, sending out a fire-serpent several dozen feet long. It was a place of clamor and splendor, yet it carried with it the savage wildness of the Wasteland. Shen Mu was moving through the crowd when suddenly the sky blazed with dazzling light.
Fine threads had imperceptibly filled the air, crisscrossing in every direction, and then the threads suddenly swelled and transformed into enormous silver dragons that swam swiftly back and forth above Flower Street. As the silver dragons moved, one could see that they were actually made of countless written characters, and as they swam they emitted thunderous demonic sounds—obscure, abstruse, utterly unintelligible. Boom!
Boom!
Violent shockwaves came roaring down, accompanied by light surging into the sky. When that light struck the darkness above Crimson Dragon City, it was swallowed up without the faintest ripple. Even the most terrifying shockwaves, when they crashed into the darkness, vanished like clay oxen plunging into the sea, leaving no trace at all.
The crowd below grew even more riotous, bursting into cheers, with no idea at all that what filled the sky above them was not fireworks but fearsome experts locked in battle. Fortunately, the shockwaves all struck upward into the darkness; otherwise, who could say how many of the people below would have been killed or wounded?
Among the silver dragons darting to and fro, several terrible figures appeared and vanished in the flickering light, like gods or demons—the lord of Crimson Dragon City, Fu Yundi, the Black Venerable, the yellow-faced woman, and others, clashing in midair.
Shen Mu moved swiftly through the crowd. This was no safe place. Even though the impact of these experts' battle all burst toward the sky, what if some of it came downward?
Then blood would flow in rivers and countless people would be left as corpses. Thunderous roars rolled ceaselessly across the sky above Crimson Dragon City, tumbling back and forth at dizzying speed—now in the east of the city, now in the west, coming and going like lightning. Behind him, the adepts of the city lord's mansion were still in pursuit, and even though Shen Mu wove this way and that through the crowd, he could not shake them off.
"This whole night has been bizarre. Still, I've gone and made trouble—I couldn't hold back my killing heart, and I slew the city lord's son.
I must tell Granny and Blind Grandpa as soon as possible and get away from here! " Shen Mu was about to quicken his pace when a dragon's roar suddenly rang out behind him.