Chapter 497 – A String of Stone Pearls (1/2)

Chapter 497 -A String of Stone Pearls

Translated by: Hypersheep325

Edited by: Michyrr

Chen Changsheng walked through the wetlands on the outskirts of the plain. He glimpsed that island of reeds and then went to that cave. In the depths of that cave, he saw the bones of that elder from the Setting Sun Sect, already picked clean by the monsters.

Then he went to Sunset Valley, slowly making his way along the mountain path of white stone, arriving by a wutong tree.

He didn't know he wanted to come to this wutong tree, he had just been following a feeling.

But this place also had no people.

There was no other person in the Garden of Zhou.

Not a single one.

Ultimately, he returned to the front of the Mausoleum of Zhou. The colossal mausoleum stood between heaven and earth, still insufferably arrogant as ever. The Heavenly Tome Monoliths arranged around the mausoleum were no longer as berserk and terrifying as they had been on that day and now seemed extremely calm. The lines on their surface, perhaps because the sand blown by the wind over these past days had filled them up or because they had been grinded away, had already disappeared, as if they had returned to their initial forms as stone pillars.

The black monolith was just like the rest, its surface smooth.

Chen Changsheng placed his hand on its surface. From the plain behind him, a burst of low howls came from the distance.

This was a sending off and also an expression of unease and imploration.

They were sending off the Garden of Zhou's new owner, uneasy that he might not come back, imploring him that in his grace, he might descend once more as quickly as possible.

……

……

There was darkness, and then light.

Chen Changsheng opened his eyes. He realized that he was still in his room, still by his window. Nothing had changed from before.

It was just that the time had already reached high noon. The sun hung up high in the azure sky. No matter how hard the trees of the Orthodox Academy worked to provide shade, it was impossible for them to prevent the descent of those scorching rays of light.

The light that he saw was sunlight.

Then he noticed that a string of stone pearls had appeared on his wrist.

In every aspect, these pearls seemed to have been made from the most ordinary stone. Their surfaces were unadorned, and they emitted no Qi. Moreover, their surfaces could not even be described as particularly smooth.

He didn't know that when he was confronting Zhu Luo's attack in Xunyang City, this string of stone pearls had appeared on his wrist.

These stone pearls were the Heavenly Tome Monoliths transformed.

Because there were eleven pearls in all, ten of them gray and one of them black.

In the past, Zhou Dufu might have taken away twelve Heavenly Tome Monoliths from the Mausoleum of Books. Later on, when he and she saw them in the Mausoleum of Zhou, there were only ten monoliths and one broken monolith base.

It was precisely because one Heavenly Tome Monolith was missing, and he had taken away the Sword Pool that had served as substitute for this Heavenly Tome Monolith, that a problem had occurred with the formation around the Mausoleum of Zhou. It was only at that point that he realized he had a black stone with him.

That black stone he had obtained from Lingyan Pavilion was actually also a Heavenly Tome Monolith.

That black stone that had come from Wang Zhice had transformed into a Heavenly Tome Monolith, allowing the formation of Heavenly Tome Monoliths around the Mausoleum of Zhou to restabilize. He had originally thought that this black stone was a Heavenly Tome Monolith that Wang Zhice had carried out of the Garden of Zhou, but later on after leaving the Garden of Zhou and recalling the contents of the notebook he had found in Lingyan Pavilion, he felt that his conjectures might not have been accurate.

Regardless of where those two Heavenly Tome Monoliths had gone, the string of stone pearls on his wrist were Heavenly Tome Monoliths.

Of course, it wasn't merely because of these eleven stone pearls, ten were gray and one was black, just so happening to conform to the number of Heavenly Tome Monoliths around the Mausoleum of Zhou. He felt this way mainly because he could sense something from that black stone.

He could clearly sense that the Garden of Zhou was within the black stone.

This sentence was not completely correct. It would be better to say that the black stone was the new gate to the Garden of Zhou and the key to open the Garden of Zhou was his spiritual sense.