Chapter 975 — Power That Reaches Heaven

Shen Mu put the map away. Yue Tingge chuckled. "Ah, I remember you now. You are the Mu Heavenly Venerable; you are a hand. To kill me, the Heavenly Court sent three Heavenly Venerables. Heh heh, they truly think highly of me. I know a fine place. I will take you there..."

He hooked an arm around the head of the golden dragon hanging down from the sky and laughed. "Good brother, I have found you at last! Shh, let us lure them there and do them to death. Heh heh, I have already lured the Fire Heavenly Venerable and the Void Heavenly Venerable to that place. I have done for two Heavenly Venerables; doing for one more is no great matter..."

Shen Mu rose and said to Luo Wushuang, "Let us go."

Luo Wushuang followed quickly, then looked back at Yue Tingge, who had turned raving mad; Yue Tingge was still talking to the golden dragon as though to a friend of many years. "Shen, the Overlord Body, is Celestial Master Yue truly mad, or is he feigning madness?"

Shen Mu shook his head. "I am not certain either. He may be truly mad, and he may be truly mad. He has always said he had a good brother; perhaps it was another Celestial Master who came here with him, his closest friend. That Celestial Master must have died in the Great Void, and he has never been able to accept it."

Luo Wushuang pondered a while and said, "Or he may be feigning madness. He cannot leave this place; to leave is certain death. The Heavenly Court wants him dead, Kaihuang's Heavenly Court was destroyed by his hand, and he cannot go to the Void Bridge to seek the Land of No Sorrow either, for if Kaihuang saw him he would kill him too. He is trapped in this land of the Great Void forever."

The Fire Heavenly Venerable's golden dragon abandoned Yue Tingge, drew in its body, shrank into the clouds and vanished.

Shen Mu looked back and saw Yue Tingge standing there all alone, in an unspeakable desolation, and then suddenly his face turned fierce and hideous again, and he cursed heaven and earth, stabbing his finger at them.

"He is too clever; he had no choice but to go mad."

Shen Mu smiled faintly. "Divine Blade Luo, do you intend to go mad and stay in the Great Void, or to leave and go on to Jingping?"

Luo Wushuang was slightly taken aback.

"The choices left to you are few," Shen Mu reminded him.

Luo Wushuang was silent a while, then said with deep feeling, "If I go back to the Heavenly Court, I die; the Empress and Yuanmu will not let me live. If I stay in the Great Void, my wits are no match for Celestial Master Yue's, and I will not live long either, and that too is death. But there has always been one obsession holding me up and keeping me alive. Shen, the Overlord Body, do you know what that long-cherished wish of mine is?"

Shen Mu smiled slightly. "Your wounds have more or less healed. Just now you ran faster than I did."

Luo Wushuang walked shoulder to shoulder with him, and for once a smile showed on his face. "Yes. The Supreme Emperor Overlord Body cut off one of my arms, but he also saved my life three times over. I can wait forty thousand years for this one arm of mine, waiting for the chance to prove my blade art to the Supreme Emperor Overlord Body, but these three life-saving debts I do not know how to repay."

The two walked shoulder to shoulder toward the last gathering place of the Creators, their momentum growing ever stronger. Ahead lay a vast golden desert; the wind rose and blew the golden grains of sand across the wastes.

Shen Mu set foot on the golden sand and left a line of footprints behind him. "Revenge and debt are two different things. He cut off one of your arms, and you cultivated bitterly for forty thousand years for revenge; he saved you three times, and you repay it with a hundred and twenty thousand years. Can it be reckoned so?"

Luo Wushuang was like a divine blade drawn from its sheath, its edge laid bare. He said in a low voice, "It can."

His momentum carved a deep blade-scar into the golden desert before them; the scar stretched onward, and on either side of it the air it stirred up formed tornado after tornado, howling and spinning, whirling golden sand up into the sky.

Within the tornadoes countless blades of light darted wildly; that was his blade art.

Shen Mu gazed far across the desert and saw dunes of golden sand shaped like crescent moons, all facing the same direction. He praised, "The Creators' craft is wondrous; they made this golden desert, a scene of magnificent and strange beauty."

His momentum burst forth, his qi and blood surging and soaring, like a boundless ocean, like fire fed with oil, burning youth and hot blood to the full.

Suddenly his sea of qi and blood stood upright, like a great banner of iron and blood abruptly unfurled, sweeping across the sky!

The Jingping Reform must be forged of iron and blood!

The two momentums clashed. In the space of a single instant, Luo Wushuang sensed within Shen Mu's momentum that spirit of the age, the spirit of overturning heaven and earth, of sweeping away the old and establishing the new!

That spirit did not belong to Shen Mu; it belonged to Jingping, to the essence and spirit of an age!

He was not stealing Jingping's spirit of the age, but had nurtured it within the great tide of the Jingping Reform, a revolution fierce as fire, a reform surging like a river.

The river runs on; when it meets a barrier it rises, drowning all that is old.

The fire blazes; a single spark can set the prairie aflame, burning all that is rotten.

"Supreme Emperor Overlord Body, please!"

Luo Wushuang struck, bold and unconstrained. In the desert, among the golden sand, the blade-light was like a rainbow; his blade opened a whole heaven, and cut at Shen Mu!

Shen Mu raised his hand; sword-light rose. Blade and sword clashed; the two men's power erupted; their bodies crashed together, blade and sword ringing in chorus!

The next moment the might within blade and sword burst out and flung them apart.

Luo Wushuang's figure fell back; he laughed aloud, and even as Shen Mu retreated he cut at him with a blade, splitting apart Shen Mu's momentum however magnificent and vast it might be!

Shen Mu thrust his sword; the sword-light stirred up a flood of golden desert, and countless dunes were swept up by it, turning into a golden passage that grew madly forward, and at the end of that passage was Luo Wushuang, a sight to make the heart quail.

Luo Wushuang's blade-light cut into that passage of golden sand; countless blades and swords clashed within it, pierced through the passage, and became a rain of blades and swords across the sky.

Luo Wushuang strode forward at a run, breaking through the rain of blades and swords ahead. Each level of the blade path was a heaven; every blade he struck formed a heaven of the blade path. By the time he had killed his way to Shen Mu, fourteen heavens of the blade path had gathered into an overwhelming might, and it fell upon Shen Mu!

In the Heavenly Court his blade art had no rival left; well did he deserve the name of the Heavenly Court's foremost divine blade!

Just as his divine blade fell, heaven and earth suddenly became utterly still. Countless strands of starlight emerged from the sky, and the golden desert beneath Shen Mu's feet revolved, becoming a diagram of the Supreme Ultimate divided into black and white.

Luo Wushuang's heart jumped. He saw a sun rise from that black-and-white desert, and a moon sink.

Behind Shen Mu, the Primordial Tree grew lush and ever taller.

"Divine flesh as one, the primordial spirit and the body united?"

Luo Wushuang swung his blade down and shouted in anger, "However great your divine powers, you cannot withstand my divine blade!"

Shen Mu raised his sword, pierced through heaven after heaven of the blade path, and pointed it straight at his brow!