Chapter 829 — Master of the Divine Blade

Huanlong Jun looked at the demigod walking toward him from afar. That demigod was likely a deity too, his body already half-immaterial. He must have been one of the mighty demigods who followed the Patriarch Dragon King, and all this time he had been hunting down the other boarders. But the man feared Li Zheng, and only dared show himself after Li Zheng had vanished.

"My lord, this man's strength is no small matter."

Huanlong Jun leaped down from the hall and said in a low voice, "I will fight him to the death. I only ask that you revive me in the future, my lord!"

"Rest easy, Dragon Lord. You are my Heavenly River Dragon King. I will not let you die here."

Shen Mu also came down from the great hall and said, "At the next cycle you will turn immaterial, and so will that demigod. You need only hold out until the next cycle, and both of you will become void."

Huanlong Jun went to meet the demigod and laughed with a heh-heh. "But I am not certain of it. The dragon blood in his veins runs purer than mine. Only if I mean to drag him down with me can I stand against him; if I mean only to buy time, he will kill me instead."

He roared, striking one palm and one fist hard together against his chest, his blood and qi surging, and laughed aloud, "When brave men meet on a narrow road, the brave prevail! I was once a god who fought for his life against the Human Sovereign Su, and I did not die beneath his sword! I followed my lord and became the Heavenly River Dragon King. I am not some petty god Heaven keeps to raise dragons for others! If you would take my lord's life, walk over my corpse!"

He and the demigod fell to battle. The two of them turned into two giant dragons, rolling and tearing at each other, commanding water and fire, their divine powers terrible.

Shen Mu walked into the great hall.

Outside came the thunderous din of the two divine dragons fighting. Of all those who had boarded the ship together, few now remained, though some still lived. He did not see Luo Wushuang's Lingxiu Army, nor the Prince Qiuming who had come from the Heavenly Court.

These people must have gone into hiding. Their cultivation had never reached the divine realm, so for now they would not turn immaterial; they could wait until the deities slaughtered one another or became void.

Shen Mu examined the palace carefully. This great hall had been Wei Suifeng's palace.

Wei Suifeng, founding patriarch of the Tiansheng Sect, had explored Guixu, and there in Guixu he had undergone a strange crossing and returned to the Longhan era.

He became a Left General of the Yulin Army of the Longhan Heavenly Court, commanding the mightiest army of gods and demons.

This eldest senior brother had some understanding of Ling Tianzun's divine power as well. When the Yulin Army was returning to the Heavenly Court, he encountered the mist once more and realized it was time for him to go back; so he extinguished his lamp and returned.

Wei Suifeng was very clever. It was quite likely that he had worked out the flaw in Ling Tianzun's divine power, and only thus escaped that calamity.

"Perhaps I will find some clue here in our eldest senior brother's palace."

Shen Mu surveyed the arrangement of the palace, noted the exact position of every object within it, and then searched carefully.

They found the founding patriarch's bookshelf. Some of the books on it were written in the ancient tongue of the gods, some in the speech of elder gods and elder demons, and some in the script of the human race.

Shen Mu leafed through them one by one, and when he had finished a book he set it back at random.

He found a notebook written in human script by his eldest senior brother, recording trifling matters of his time in the Longhan Heavenly Court. Shen Mu read through it carefully. There was not much useful information in it, but inside was a map showing the way to Guixu.

Shen Mu was slightly startled. This map of Guixu matched one of the maps his eldest senior brother had left him fairly well; though the geography differed in small ways, for the most part it was the same.

"So Guixu is one of the places our eldest senior brother wanted me to seek! He must have left something there as well, and it must be something of great importance!"

Shen Mu steadied himself. As things stood, the maps Wei Suifeng had given him all concealed great secrets and treasures. The first time, he had found the Yulin Army's command tally.

With the second map, he had found the Divine Man of Chixi and the God-Slaying Mystic Blade, but that was not the chief thing. The chief gain had been making contact with the remnants of the Chiming era and bringing Jingping into alliance with the Divine Son of Chiming.

With the third map, Shen Mu had found the brain in the jar of the Yingzhao deity in Taiming Heaven, and obtained the complete blueprints of the Ark of the Other Shore.

And this map of Guixu was the fourth map whose name he knew. Wei Suifeng had returned to the Longhan Heavenly Court while exploring Guixu. He must have made some discovery there, then hidden the secret in Guixu, waiting for the woodcutter or for him to unearth it.

The ghost ship gave a faint tremor, a sign that it was about to cycle once more.

Shen Mu's expression shifted slightly. He flew from the great hall, weighed the notebook down with a stone, picked up a brush, scrawled wildly over the pillar where Ling Tianzun had left her poem, and then shot backward.

Outside the hall, Huanlong Jun's battle with that divine dragon continued, dragon blood spraying. The two had fought themselves red-eyed; even with the cycle about to come, neither could stop.

Light burst forth, and the ghost ship left that time and space. When the light faded and Shen Mu's sight returned to normal, he saw that the scroll of the notebook he had weighed down with a stone had vanished without a trace!

Shen Mu's eyes lit up. He returned to the hall, and saw that the things he had just scattered at random had been restored to their original state, neat and orderly, not the least bit disturbed.

Shen Mu turned and walked out of the great hall, studying the pillar before it. The traces of his wild scrawling had vanished, but Ling Tianzun's writing remained.

Shen Mu was briefly startled, then suddenly burst out laughing.

In the distance, Huanlong Jun's opponent had vanished. The great dragon too was spent, his body covered in wounds, and his form had grown immaterial, about to become void. Panting, he asked, "What does my lord laugh at?"

"I changed the positions of the objects. After the cycle, they returned to their original places."

Shen Mu studied the poem on the pillar with keen interest and said with a smile, "I also scrawled over Ling Tianzun's poem, and the places I scrawled vanished too, while Ling Tianzun's poem remained. Do you know what that means?"

Huanlong Jun was at a loss.

"We are inside Ling Tianzun's divine power. It is impossible to change anything on this ship; anything on the ship that is damaged will be restored after the cycle. But Ling Tianzun boarded later, and yet she changed something on the ship. She left a poem on the pillar."

Shen Mu asked, "Why could her poem remain?"

Huanlong Jun was even more at a loss, and shook his head. "My lord, I have a dull head. Otherwise I would not have been captured by you and forced to become the Heavenly River Dragon King."

"The matter on this ship neither increases nor decreases, neither changes nor alters; yet Ling Tianzun could leave a poem, which means she broke her own divine power."

Shen Mu said with a smile, "In her poem she set out the principle behind this divine power of hers, and in writing the poem she used the method to break it. In other words, in this little poem she hid both the divine power of matter's unchanging permanence and the way to break it. Huanlong Jun, Huanlong Jun..."

Huanlong Jun's form grew fainter and fainter. He looked back, and the Dragon King seemed to fade like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow.