Chapter 735 — Strange Peaks at Heaven's Edge, a Hundred Palms Revolving

The gods within Jade Capital City were shaken to the core, and all of them turned to look at Shen Mu: "Is he that Overlord Body the Grand Heavenly Master spoke of? Isn't the Overlord Body the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping?"

In that brief instant, Shen Mu's thousand arms returned to six, and all his divine abilities fused in the space of a breath into six forces of palm, meeting Hu Bugui's Wind Shakes the Pines, Waves Quake the Valley.

Strange Peaks Beyond the Heavens, a Thousand Palms Returning.

This was his martial dao divine ability.

Hu Bugui's Wind Shakes the Pines, Waves Quake the Valley: his fist intent like wind, his figure like a pine, a thousand pines forming a forest. When he struck, his divine ability burst forth and his body was as wind through the waves of pines, while the eruption of power crushed and shook the valley.

Shen Mu's great martial dao divine ability, by contrast, fused into one all the physical-body divine abilities of the combat schools he had once learned; the earlier thousand arms and thousand palms had been for the very purpose of merging these techniques and abilities.

The combat arts of such masters as Old Master Huo, the Butcher, the Blind Elder, and the Human Sovereigns of past ages became in his hands a succession of strange peaks, each with its own fist intent; thoroughly mastered and made one, they were the Strange Peaks Beyond the Heavens, a Thousand Palms Returning.

That single divine ability of his was meant to display those varied and splendid scenes of strange peaks.

Behind him emerged the divine treasures of the Spirit Fetus, the Five Luminaries, the Six Harmonies, and the Heaven-Man. Yet strangely, not only was he missing the Seven Stars divine treasure; beneath those divine treasures there ought also to be mirrored another whole set of Spirit Fetus, Five Luminaries, Six Harmonies, and Heaven-Man divine treasures!

The upper were the divine path; the lower, the demonic path.

God and demon, mirroring each other, gathered in a single body.

The thirty-six War Gods of Jade Capital City finally understood why Shen Mu, at the Heaven-Man realm, could stand against Hu Bugui's great martial dao divine ability.

Hu Bugui was of the Life and Death realm, and had refined that realm to perfection. Because everyone in the Dou Niu Realm was trapped at the Life and Death realm and could advance no further, the martial artists of the Dou Niu Realm had developed every realm to a perfection of the utmost extreme.

Hu Bugui was the finest among them.

It could be said that in the Life and Death realm, no one's cultivation ran deeper than his.

And yet when Shen Mu fought Hu Bugui, he matched him evenly — proof that Shen Mu, at the Heaven-Man realm, was not far behind Hu Bugui in cultivation.

Only upon seeing Shen Mu's divine treasures did the thirty-six War Gods understand the reason for the extraordinary depth of his cultivation.

To cultivate god and demon alike, and to possess two sets of divine treasures corresponding to each other — such a being had likely never existed before or since.

"So it truly is an Overlord Body; the Grand Heavenly Master did not lie!" The thirty-six War Gods were stricken with awe.

When the Woodcutter Sage came to their little mountain village seeking the Old Farmer, urging him to leave the mountains, he had spoken of the Overlord Body and of the Sage that appears once in five hundred years.

The villagers had all been present and heard it, and they were most curious about the Jingping Reforms, and no less curious about the Overlord Body and the once-in-five-hundred-years Sage.

But the very next moment the Woodcutter Sage was beaten by the Old Farmer into a stinking ditch, every bone in his body broken; luckily the Old Farmer had struck lightly and spared his life, so they could not be clear which of the two was the Overlord Body and which the Sage.

— The Old Farmer harbored deep resentment toward the Woodcutter; the matter between them was no simple question of the Heavenly Master rankings, for there were other grudges and entanglements besides.

From what Old Ox had just said, that Overlord Body was none other than this descendant of Kaihuang who had come seeking the Woodcutter — though they had still found it hard to believe. Now, seeing Shen Mu break through in a single turn of thought and cultivate a martial dao primordial spirit, and almost in the same instant stand on the verge of entering the Dao through martial arts, and with those corresponding divine and demonic divine treasures besides, they had no choice but to believe.

To go in a mere ten days from a divine ability user who did not even possess a martial soul, to comprehending in succession the martial soul and the martial dao primordial spirit, and now to be on the verge of comprehending a great martial dao divine ability and entering the Dao through martial arts — how could such a person not be an Overlord Body?

Yet it had never occurred to them that the reason Shen Mu could comprehend the martial soul so swiftly was precisely that his foundation was so good.

His foundation was simply too good.

In his childhood Shen Mu had failed to awaken a Spirit Fetus, and the elders of Hidden Remnant Village found him to be an utterly ordinary commoner, incapable of cultivation — until a single word from the village headman, "Overlord Body," roused the elders to high spirits. They piled all manner of spirit medicines and spirit beast blood upon Shen Mu, and their training of him was ferocious beyond measure.

And because Shen Mu firmly believed himself an Overlord Body, his confidence was boundless, and he cultivated with diligence and bitter toil.

At that time he was a single step from awakening his martial soul.

More crucially still, what he cultivated was the Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art, which the village headman had told him of with his own lips — a technique that everyone else took for a common, run-of-the-mill yuan-guiding art, yet which Shen Mu cultivated to a height no one could hope to reach.

What was more, it was no ordinary yuan-guiding art, but a technique handed down by Kaihuang, the hereditary secret art of the Shen family; even the Heavenly Sage Cult's Great Nurturing Dark Demon Scripture was but a branch of this very technique.

With so fine a foundation, and with Shen Mu having learned the techniques and divine abilities of every combat school, with the painstaking efforts of the Human Sovereigns of past ages passed down in him, and having also fused three Throne-tier cultivation arts, his accumulated depth already far surpassed that of Hu Bugui, who had ground away at the martial dao in bitter isolation.

The spirit of the age embodied in the Jingping Reforms he blended into the spirit of the martial dao, setting his aims above the martial dao alone; deep accumulation released in a thin burst — thus could he comprehend the true essence of the martial dao in so short a time.

This was not, as the War Gods and Old Ox guessed, because he was an Overlord Body; but the true cause Shen Mu did not understand, and others understood it even less, so it could only be laid at the door of his being an Overlord Body.

Shen Mu's six forces of palm met Wind Shakes the Pines, Waves Quake the Valley, and the power of two different martial dao divine abilities burst forth at once. Yet because he had been pressed for time, Shen Mu had not been able to comprehend his great martial dao divine ability to perfection, and came off the worse in raw power.

But he had six arms, and where the power of the divine ability fell short, he stacked the force of three great divine abilities one upon another to raise it.

When the two great martial dao divine abilities collided, the earth beneath their feet instantly grew brittle and burst apart. Though this was the Dou Niu Palace, incomparably firm, these two experts marching toward the martial dao still stirred up a terrifying upheaval.