Chapter 75
Chapter 75
Everyone present stood frozen.
The River God had taken Shen Huaizhou, but… Shen Huaizhou had a dick!!!
Dai Xingyu muttered, “Seriously… should I say the River God has damn good eyes, or damn awful ones?”
Her lust had truly made her fearless!
[Every bride who is taken away ultimately sinks to the riverbed. They lie there in silence, letting mud and sand eat away at their features, like lotuses buried in the silt.]
[Lie down. Go to sleep. There is only the sound of flowing water beside your ears, only the sight of fish swimming before your eyes. Once tonight has passed, the bride’s body and soul will belong to the River God forever.]
Xie Qingling said, “The River God took Shen Huaizhou and sank him to the riverbed.”
“Once tonight has passed, the bride’s body and soul will belong to the River God forever.” Xie Qingling repeated the voice in her mind, her expression settling into calm. “Tonight isn’t over yet. Shen Huaizhou isn’t in danger for now.”
Now that he had definite confirmation, three deep furrows gathered between Ling Fang’s brows.
Xie Qingling was taking this far too lightly.
He had said it was best to let Xie Qingling lead this operation and avoid disrupting its rhythm. After all, the arrow was on the string and had to be loosed. But Shen Huaizhou’s disappearance still made him waver.
Ling Fang said, “Call off the operation against the River God. We rescue Shen Huaizhou first.”
Ye Anran and the others had just started to emerge from their ambush positions when they heard Xie Qingling say, “No. The operation against the River God continues.”
“Stop fooling around!!” Ling Fang shouted.
For a moment, Ye Anran and the others had no idea whose order to obey. They could only remain frozen where they were.
Ling Fang stared at Xie Qingling as though she had lost her mind. “The River God took Shen Huaizhou. If we don’t rescue him, he’ll die.”
“But he won’t die now.” Xie Qingling spoke earnestly. “Shen Huaizhou can hold his breath underwater for a day. At the very least, he’ll be safe until dawn. We’ve spent so long preparing for this. If we stop now, we’ll never get another opportunity this good.”
Ling Fang laughed in fury. “I put you in command of this operation. I didn’t give you the right to decide a teammate’s life or death so casually.”
“Of course we could stop now and bring Shen Huaizhou back, but that would also enrage the River God. She still controls the river. If we halt the operation and back down, she could unleash a flood, and there’s no telling how many lives it would take to pay the price. But if we press our advantage and kill the River God here and now, Shen Huaizhou will be safe too.”
“You gave me command, so of course you can take it back right now.” Xie Qingling raised one leg and pulled Bloodsworn free, her voice unexpectedly calm. “If you do, I’ll shut my mouth this instant and say nothing more. But as our team leader, you can also choose to trust my judgment. Trust me this once.”
Ling Fang fell silent. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.
He stared hard into Xie Qingling’s eyes and found only cool composure.
Xie Qingling continued, “Director, your intentions are good, and you’ve done well. You want to protect us, but sheltering us beneath your wings, arranging everything down to the last detail, and keeping every risk at bay isn’t the only way to do that.”
“Danger isn’t some fixed quantity. One day, something will happen that you can’t account for. If your team members can’t stand on their own, they’ll still be doomed when that day comes. Sometimes, you can choose to trust us. Your team isn’t as fragile as you think.”
“You decide. Do we continue or stop?” Xie Qingling tossed the decision back into his hands.
Ling Fang clenched his jaw and was about to speak when Shen Huaizhou’s muffled voice suddenly came through their earpieces. “Director, listen to her. I can hold on.”
Listen to her??
At a time like this, he still wanted them to listen to her?
Shen Huaizhou was really something else, damn it!
Dai Xingyu was stunned senseless.
Having followed Xie Qingling and Shen Huaizhou out of the city on missions before, he had long grown accustomed to how the pair operated when no one else was watching.
Whenever the Director was away, they went completely insane. They threw their lives away. They did the most outrageous damn things.
But acting this crazy at a life-or-death moment was going too far.
Dai Xingyu was too shocked to speak.
“Some kind of energy has me trapped. I can’t break free. All I can do is lie here on the riverbed.” Shen Huaizhou’s voice came through again, muffled as though someone had clamped a hand over his mouth. “Once you kill the River God, I can swim back up on my own.”
“I’ll be fine,” Shen Huaizhou said.
“You’re insane. You’re all fucking insane!” Ling Fang roared. Suddenly, he raised a hand and slapped himself hard across the face. Fixing his eyes on Xie Qingling, he said, “The operation continues.”
“Everyone, listen up. From this moment on, you will follow Xie Qingling’s orders without question. That includes me.”
Ye Anran’s small heart hammered nervously in her chest. Through the hazy, indistinct moonlight, she looked toward Ling Fang, but his face was dark as he returned silently to his position, ready to light the lamp at any moment.
She had no choice but to look at Yu Wei. She saw him give her a conflicted nod.
That was enough to reassure Ye Anran.
Everyone returned to their positions and resumed the formation, as though nothing had happened.
The operation to take down the River God continued.
Xie Qingling opened her silver case, took out the deity shrine containing Shuiyong and the Fang God, and set it on the ground.
“I’ll force the River God out. Wait for my order. The moment she appears, light the lamp and activate the God-Slaying Formation.”
“Understood,” Ling Fang said.
Xie Qingling murmured, “Yin and yang reflect heaven and earth; talismans command ghosts and gods. Shuiyong, Fang God, lend me your strength!”
As Xie Qingling’s low shout fell, the ground suddenly began to rumble. The flat earth buckled as though something were crawling at great speed beneath it, tearing through the firmly packed riverbank and splitting it with crack after crack.
The fissure spread all the way toward the riverbed. Like an invisible tentacle, it reached onward until it entered the river.
The river, which had flowed quietly beneath the moon, suddenly erupted in towering waves.
The waves rose without wind. Turbid water swept up years of garbage and silt from the riverbed, churning into a colossal whirlpool that seemed ready to swallow everything nearby.
The whirlpool grew wider and taller until it towered far above the riverbed, as though an unseen force had lifted it into the air.
The pounding of colliding currents and the deep churn of the whirlpool shattered the mountain’s silence.
The waves stirred the wind. At last it surged and howled, violently bending the trees on the riverbank and flattening the grass.
Xie Qingling stood on the bank, close to the whirlpool. The screaming wind threatened to tear the red clothes from her body.
Yet not a single drop of water landed on her. She seemed fixed in place, watching from close at hand as a god secretly worked a miracle of nature.
[The water deity returns to the river and calls out to their former subjects. Every living spirit within the river obeys. Together, with tremendous force, they vow to churn this rotten, lightless riverbed inside out once more.]
[Tremble. Submit. Hateful River God, brutal deity, relinquish the authority in your hands!]
Suddenly, the riverbed shook as though an earthquake had struck.
A thunderous rumble broke the whirlpool’s rotation. All movement seemed to stop.
The river’s surface temporarily returned to calm, but the calm was only temporary.
In the next instant, the waves that had not yet subsided shot skyward. It was as if a pair of invisible hands had raised a world-shaking wave from the surface for no reason at all.
The enormous wave reared more than ten meters high. It lifted its massive head, then bent and crashed toward Xie Qingling, intent on swallowing the tiny human whole.
The wave brought suffocating pressure with it. By comparison, Xie Qingling’s body as a Spirit Wielder looked no different from a mortal’s. Before that towering mass of water, she seemed so small that once swallowed, she would swiftly become an invisible speck of dust on the riverbed.
But before it could come crashing down, another colossal wave surged up and crushed the first halfway to shore, smashing it back into the river.
[Shuiyong attempts to wrest authority over the river back from the River God. The River God and Shuiyong give chase, struggling against each other. Enraged, the River God decides to punish the human who does not know their own limits.]
[She swears to divert the river and unleash a flood, bringing the waters down upon houses and drowning the crops. Wherever the river passes, no blade of grass will survive, and corpses will float across the land.]
As the voice in Xie Qingling’s mind faded, the river split down the middle into two halves.
One half flowed calmly on as usual. The other churned and roiled madly, then tilted toward the bank where Xie Qingling stood. A monstrous wave blotted out the sky like a giant beast intent on devouring everything.
Xie Qingling slapped one hand against the deity shrine and shouted, “Fang God, stop her!”
The instant her words fell, a towering wall of earth rose from the ground.
The wall stood directly in the path of the wave about to burst its banks, forcing the water back into the river channel.
The wave crashed toward shore again, refusing to relent and determined to smash through the dam.
It still failed.
For every inch the wave rose, the wall grew stronger.
For every foot evil rose, righteousness rose ten feet.
The river then changed course. Instead of winding around the green mountain, it turned in the opposite direction.
Roughly sixteen acres of farmland lay there. Heavy heads of rice bowed low, the grain soon to ripen in the golden autumn and be gathered into the farmers’ granaries. But if the flood swept across the fields, it would drown every hope of a harvest.
The Fang God followed. Wherever the river passed, dam after dam rose along its banks, imprisoning the water and preventing it from spilling out in disaster.
After the pursuit, the river returned to its original bed, unable to move another inch.
Shuiyong and the Fang God had imprisoned the River God.
Although she had feasted on the mortal world’s incense offerings and sacrifices for thirty years, she found herself overmatched by these two gods who had existed since ancient times.
The river seemed to return to calm.
Moonlight spilled across the surface, shimmering over ripples and mist and creating an illusion of gentle, captivating beauty.
[Cunning humans. Dishonorable humans who bring allies to a fight. You have utterly enraged the River God.]
[She decides to come ashore in person and teach you shameless, arrogant humans – you humans who do not know your own limits – a lesson.]
[Water laps against the bank. That is the sound of her footsteps. Reeds bow beside the river. That is where she treads through the grass.]
[She is here.]
The River God was coming ashore.
Xie Qingling shouted, “Light the lamp!”
Ling Fang lit the lamp before him. A bean-sized flame sprang from the wick, its orange light dancing in the darkness.
The God-Slaying Formation activated. The lines drawn upon the ground released a brilliant glow, shining in the night.
[Fine grass in an empty forest. A god descends into the world. Dimly seen beyond a thread of ghostly lamplight, a peach-blossom face emerges.]