Chapter 918 — Being and Non-Being Beget Each Other, Yet All Ends in Void

Once well away from the Great Prison, Shen Mu halted the Dragon Qilin and said with a smile: "Yan Shaoqing has not come after us. The jailbreak is settled. You may come out now. Yan Shaoqing is a clever man; he will use his divine power of consciousness to cover this up for us, and no one will know you have escaped."

Beneath his feet were three shadows; two of them squirmed, rose upright, and gradually became the Jingping Imperial Preceptor and Emperor Yanfeng.

Emperor Yanfeng breathed the air outside with greed, still scarcely able to believe it, and murmured: "I truly have come out alive. I thought I would die in there..."

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor bowed to Shen Mu: "Thank you, Senior Brother, for the rescue!"

Shen Mu hastily returned the courtesy, and said with a smile: "If you had not taught him the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primal Spirits, I would hardly have found the flaw in his art so smoothly and planted a demon seed in his Dao heart. To keep that Emperor Throne art, the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primal Spirits, abreast of the times, we spent no one knows how much manpower and wisdom studying its flaws."

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor said gravely: "But to hold him so utterly in check — that is not so easily done."

"With the Great Brahma Heaven King Buddha's Immeasurable Kalpa Scripture I entered his dreams, and in a very short time deduced countless possibilities and found the simplest way to check him. Then with the Dao of Youdu I planted a demon in his Dao heart; the demon flower bloomed there and plunged him into dreams and illusions."

Shen Mu said: "My divine power invaded his divine treasures from his Dao heart, and was planted within them; for him to leap free of the dreams and illusions I made for him is now all too difficult. Each time he forcibly breaks through an illusion, he in truth sinks deeper into the dream; and every time he breaks my divine power of consciousness, it only sinks him the deeper into the Immeasurable Kalpas, to undergo calamity after calamity."

Emperor Yanfeng and the Jingping Imperial Preceptor were lost in admiration.

The Immeasurable Kalpa Scripture was the Emperor Throne true scripture of the Great Brahma Heaven King Buddha; the Undying Consciousness was the Emperor Throne art of the Crimson Emperor; and planting a demon in the Dao heart was a method from the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Scripture of the Woodcutter Sage.

Shen Mu had fused these three arts and divine powers; catalyzed by the Jingping Reforms, they had trapped even so dreadful an existence as one at the Lingxiao realm — truly a skill beyond mortal reckoning.

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor's eyes flickered. "Yan Shaoqing may one day be a fellow traveler on our Dao," he said. "I have already pointed out a road to him. Now we shall see whether he comes to walk it."

"Though the two of you are free men now, you must not show your true faces; you will have to change your appearances," Shen Mu reminded them.

Emperor Yanfeng and the Jingping Imperial Preceptor nodded. They had cultivated the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primal Spirits and the Profound Scripture of Flawless Creation — the two supreme works of the arts of creation — and to change their faces, and even to alter the structure of their primordial spirits, was a simple matter for them.

Shen Mu took out a mirror and handed it to the Jingping Imperial Preceptor. "Within this mirror lies the fruit of the Heavenly Court's million years of research into the ancient gods," he said. "The Dao Ancestor gave it to me. It was with the knowledge in it that the Heavenly Court remade weapons such as Heaven Venerable Yu. Study it well."

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor examined it closely; a world was hidden within the mirror, and within that world were countless jade slips, each stamped with various runes.

"You give this thing to us — and what of yourself?" asked the Jingping Imperial Preceptor.

"I refined the mirror myself. Refining as many as I wish is no trouble at all."

Shen Mu turned his hand and brought out another mirror, smiling. "Set two identical mirrors facing each other, and the jade slips will be imprinted into the other mirror. I have several more mirrors here; do not worry about me. My friends, let us part here!"

He bowed and said: "I am going to the Heavenly Court, and who knows when I shall return. Emperor Yanxiu and I made an agreement, setting a term of one year — within a year I will go back to see her. If the two of you should return to Jingping, tell them on my behalf that I am well!"

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor said: "You are not going back? You truly mean to go to the Heavenly Court?"

Shen Mu laughed. "I want to see whether the Heavenly Court has any weakness at all. Only by knowing both yourself and your enemy can you fight a hundred battles without danger; if I do not go to the Heavenly Court, I will never know its true strength and weakness. So I must go!"

Emperor Yanfeng said suddenly: "Have you married Yuxiu? Have you become her empress?"

Shen Mu's face went scarlet; he waved his hands in flustered denial. "How can Your Majesty say such a thing? We are innocent!"

Emperor Yanfeng spat. "We — I — as the father of Emperor Yanxiu, do not wish you to be innocent at all. You wretch, I am worrying that you will never get a wife; I am not trying to sell my daughter to you. Is it worth being frightened like that? I am not going to have your head cut off! You are just like the Jingping Imperial Preceptor — the two of you have earned your bachelorhood on merit. If I had not granted the Jingping Imperial Preceptor a wife back then, look at him now, a lonely old man..."

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor coughed once and reminded him: "Your Majesty, it is time to go."

Emperor Yanfeng sighed. "I am no longer emperor; Yuxiu is emperor. And you are no longer the Jingping Imperial Preceptor — heaven knows what bastard holds the post now."

Shen Mu reminded him: "That bastard is standing right in front of you — and that bastard has just saved your lives."

Emperor Yanfeng roared with laughter and waved farewell.

Shen Mu, high in spirits, shouted: "Dragon Fatty, let us be off—"

Emperor Yanfeng and the Jingping Imperial Preceptor watched him go into the distance; after a long while, Emperor Yanfeng, his face changed, said: "Yuxiu has become emperor, and he has become the Jingping Imperial Preceptor — fate does love to mock us. I had hoped the two of them would end up together."

"In truth, Your Majesty, had you not long ago envisioned this very future?"

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor, too, changed his face, and walked toward the east, saying calmly: "We had long since laid our plans. If the Reforms failed and we died, there would need to be someone to inherit our unfulfilled will. The ones Your Majesty chose were precisely Emperor Yanxiu and Sect Master Shen."

Emperor Yanfeng followed after him, and after a moment's silence said: "Back then I was emperor, and I did not think of Yuxiu's happiness; I only wanted her to inherit our cause. Now I am not an emperor but a father, and I no longer wish her to shoulder that burden; I only hope she can find a husband after her own heart and live out her days in peace and happiness. But now that she is emperor, the chance of her being with Shen Mu is vanishingly small. That boy cannot be her empress, and an emperor cannot be married out. The two of them..."

He shook his head and said no more.

The Jingping Imperial Preceptor understood what he meant.

Ling Yuxiu had inherited the throne and become Emperor Yanxiu; Shen Mu had become the new Jingping Imperial Preceptor. Never again would there be any possibility of the two being together.

Ling Yuxiu must have realized this outcome when she inherited the position, and yet she had taken up the throne.

And Shen Mu, when he agreed to become her Jingping Imperial Preceptor, had realized it too — and yet he had become her Jingping Imperial Preceptor all the same.