Heavenly Calamity

Chapter 458: Heavenly Calamity

“A heavenly dog eating the sun?” Li Huowang stared at the pitch-black sky above him, his brows furrowed tightly as he listened to Zhuge Yuan.

“Could it be a solar eclipse?” Li Huowang guessed, his thoughts chaotic.

But he quickly dismissed that possibility. Back in first grade, he had once witnessed a solar eclipse.

Even during a solar eclipse, the sun in the sky wasn’t completely black. There was still a rim of light; it was never this utterly dark.

CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG—the violent sound of gongs rang out, accompanied by Lü Zhuangyuan’s shouting, tinged with a theatrical cadence, echoing over Niuxin Village. “The heavenly dog is eating the sun~! Hurry, bang the drums and gongs to scare the heavenly dog away~!!”

If the sound hadn’t been raised, it might have been fine, but once it started, the entire village was thrown into panic.

Li Huowang braced one hand on the windowsill, jumped directly to the first floor, and walked toward the sound.

He hadn’t gone far before he saw Lü Zhuangyuan leading his troupe, holding up lanterns in one hand and vigorously beating their opera instruments with the other.

“Enough! All of you stop!” Li Huowang snatched the gong from Lü Zhuangyuan’s hand.

“Little Daoist, you might be good at other things, but this… you really don’t have my experience. This is the heavenly dog eating the sun! Back then, it was my third uncle who led the whole village in beating gongs to drive the heavenly dog away!”

Li Huowang frowned at the man’s confident words. “That won’t work! Hurry and tell everyone in the village to gather at the Bai family compound! Count the heads!”

“But, if we don’t beat the gongs, what if the heavenly dog really does eat the sun?”

“Go now! If you keep talking, I’ll burn everything you’re holding!”

Lü Zhuangyuan seemed about to say more, but seeing how serious Li Huowang was, he immediately took his sons and apprentices to round people up.

Watching them disappear into the distance with their lanterns, Li Huowang finally had a moment to look up and question Zhuge Yuan carefully.

“Brother Zhuge, is this truly a Heavenly Calamity? Are you sure it isn’t something else?”

In this mad world, he wouldn’t be surprised by any other mad thing that happened.

Zhuge Yuan looked askance at the top left corner, recalling. “It should be correct. I once read a minor record that documented this calamity of sunless days.”

“Brother Zhuge, did that minor record say anything else about this so-called heavenly dog eating the sun?”

“No. But Brother Li, the key point isn’t the calamity itself; it’s the timing. Do you remember what year the last calamity was?”

“Last year.” Lifting his head again to look at the ink-black sky, Li Huowang remembered his experience during the last calamity.

That time, decay had disappeared. So everything in the world stopped spoiling or rotting. The process wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t slow either.

This was why Li Huowang was so calm now. Though it was called a Heavenly Calamity, aside from the nun’s death, the last one hadn’t affected him at all.

“Exactly. Yet, Heavenly Calamities have always been separated by decades. Why has another one come after only two years? Brother Li, when a man ignores reason, disaster follows; when things are abnormal, there must be evil at work!”

Zhuge Yuan’s words made Li Huowang’s heart give a start. “Are you saying that, in the White Jade Capital right now…”

Before Li Huowang could finish, Zhuge Yuan, his expression grave, cut him off directly. “Brother Li, since you are a Heart-Element and have begun to cultivate the true, you should speak of those things as little as possible, to avoid…”

Li Huowang immediately understood the other man’s meaning and swallowed the words on the tip of his tongue.

He stood there and pondered for a long time, only stopping when Lü Juren came with a lantern to report that every single person in Niuxin Village had been accounted for.

Li Huowang cupped his hands toward the air. “Brother Zhuge, no matter what’s happening over there, I think we should first focus on safely getting through this Heavenly Calamity.”

“There’s no point in me considering those things, because no matter what I do, I can’t decide anything.”

“Wrong, wrong. Every common man has a stake in the fate of his empire. Let me think it over carefully, carefully.” Zhuge Yuan tapped his own forehead with his folded fan and fell silent.

Seeing Lü Juren gasp in shock and look at him with fearful trepidation, Li Huowang offered no explanation and walked toward the Bai family compound.

When he returned to the compound, Li Huowang saw many people kneeling on the ground, bowing wildly into the surrounding darkness. Under these circumstances, fear made everyone look for something to cling to.

“Kid, is there enough food?” Under these conditions, Li Huowang didn’t plan to go out anymore. He intended to have them all hole up in this compound and wait for the heavenly dog eating the sun to pass.

“Senior Brother Li, don’t worry. There’s definitely enough. There’s still last year’s old grain in the grain storehouse; enough for us to eat for two or three years. There’s also a well in the yard. We won’t go without food or drink.”

Li Huowang nodded. He took the Daoist bell from Chun Xiaoman’s waist and gave it a sharp shake. The piercing sound instantly drew everyone’s attention.

“Don’t panic! This is just a Heavenly Calamity. It’ll be gone in a few days. All we have to do is wait.”

With Li Huowang’s proclamation, the fear on the faces of the other Niuxin villagers lessened, though it was still there, far better than before.

Finally, when Li Huowang ordered Yang Xiaowa to slaughter an ox for meat, their attention was immediately captured by the choice of whether or not to kill the ox and eat beef, leaving them no time to keep worrying.

“Red Center boss is great! Red Center boss is tall! Playing these people like a bunch of fools!”

Li Huowang directly ignored the taunt from his hallucinatory Zuowandao and spoke to Zhuge Yuan again. “Brother Zhuge, how much work do you think it will take the Supervisory Heavenly Office to suppress this Heavenly Calamity?”

“Even though the Supervisory Heavenly Office claims to resist Heavenly Calamities, I really have my doubts about whether they actually have a method.”

If the appearance of a Heavenly Calamity represented a struggle between Simings over control of the Dao…

Having witnessed the astonishing power of Doumu, Li Huowang seriously doubted whether a mere mortal organization truly had the right to participate in such matters.

Or perhaps, everything the so-called Supervisory Heavenly Office said was nothing but boastful lies.

“They do have power. But before this, the Supervisory Heavenly Office fought the Zuowandao to the bitter end. I wonder if they can spare the attention right now.”

Upon hearing this, Li Huowang’s feelings were very complicated. In the past, his attitude toward the Supervisory Heavenly Office, which treated human life like grass, had always been one of rejection.

But he never thought he would one day be hoping for them to resume normal operations as soon as possible.

After all, no matter how poorly they performed or how many people they killed, they were still indispensable to the common people of this land.

“Brother Zhuge, you said before that this is abnormal. The Supervisory Heavenly Office will definitely step in to resolve this matter of two Heavenly Calamities occurring so close together, right?”

“While that is indeed the case, this Great Liang’s Supervisory Heavenly Office has become entangled with the imperial family. I find it hard to trust them.”

“Even if Great Liang is false, according to the ancestral teachings, the Supervisory Heavenly Office must not collude with any secular power, nor may it assist the imperial family in conquering cities and strongholds. That is the business of the military.”