Chapter 1403 — The Prison Locks the Heart, the Dao Endures Forever

The cultivation strength Shen Mu could bring to bear grew steadily greater, and the pace of his walking grew steadily faster; bit by bit, the mysteries of the realm called the Nine Prisons Platform were opened up by him.

Within his heavenly palaces, the Nine Prisons Platform too gradually surfaced; drawing on his own understanding of how the Nine Prisons Platform imprisoned the dao heart, he was re-architecting the heavenly prison of his heavenly court, turning that heavenly prison into a realm.

With his own intelligence and talent alone, he could never have opened up every mystery of such a realm; it would still take the efforts of other gods, and of countless people in generations to come, before this realm could ripen into maturity. For now, however, he could at least fix this realm in place.

And since he himself had passed bodily through the Nine Prisons Platform and personally undone its seals, he stood above gods of the future beyond counting.

The Nine Prisons Platform was simply too perilous, far too perilous; few indeed could enter it and gather their dao heart anew without dying.

The road ahead, then, was this: Shen Mu would develop the realm and pass on the way to open the Nine Prisons Platform, so that the world might open that realm for itself. Essentially, all gods would go on developing the mysteries of the Nine Prisons Platform upon the foundation he laid, and so their comprehension could never be as exquisite as entering the Platform directly.

Of course, if one had the strength to enter the true Nine Prisons Platform, one could comprehend it as he had and temper oneself thereby, and one's attainments would not fall below his.

But those who could reach that step were few and far between; even among the Ten Heavenly Venerates, those able to step into the Nine Prisons Platform and win its mysteries surely numbered fewer than five.

More likely, the Nine Prisons Platform could not hold the Ten Heavenly Venerates at all: they entered, and then left, and gained nothing.

The demands the Nine Prisons Platform made upon the dao heart were simply too high; at the slightest misstep, one might well sink forever in that prison.

To walk out of the Nine Prisons Platform alive required extraordinary attainment in the cultivation of the Dao Realm, and at the very least the twenty-fourth heaven of the Dao Realm!

Yet even the twenty-fourth heaven of the Dao Realm was no guarantee one would walk out alive; Shen Mu had walked out because of the fortune that was his, and others might well not share such fortune.

The gods of the present all belonged to the divine-treasury heavenly-palace system; gods and demons cared only for power, their attainment in the Dao Realm was shallow, and so for them to fall into that prison was death and nothing else.

As time passed, Shen Mu undid more and more seals; within his primal-embryo divine treasury, the Ancestral Court had wholly regained its vitality, the great Dao flourishing.

The nineteen heavenly palaces each recovered as well, and one primordial spirit after another stood tall within them, vast in divine power.

And the divine treasuries — Xuandu, Youdu, Yuandu, and all the myriad heavens and worlds — were being unsealed one after another.

Shen Mu's cultivation grew purer and purer, the working of his dao heart ever more lucid and radiant.

He sank into a wondrous state: the dao mysteries of the Nine Prisons Platform became dao sounds and dao resonances, and as his vital essence and his great Dao broke seal after seal, those sounds and resonances became strange dao patterns that knit themselves into the heavenly-prison Nine Prisons Platform within each of his heavenly palaces.

Nor was that all: Shen Mu even marshaled the cultivation newly gained to him, preparing to open a Nine Prisons Platform on the reverse face of his own Ancestral Court, besides the ones to be opened in his heavenly palaces. And his ambition did not stop there — within his own Ancestral Court he would raise four heavenly gates, cultivate Yao Terrace and Yao Pool, and forge his own God-Slaying Platform and Jade Capital City.

In that tiny inch-square space, his cultivation grew ever more majestic and his pacing ever faster.

The inch-square space seemed to him an endless road for the tempering of the dao heart; from within his body came crackling detonations as his sealed consciousness and great Dao broke their seals without cease.

His blood and qi surged like a wild tide, pouring out of the Ninth Prison to fill the Eighth, the Seventh, the Sixth.

After a moment, all at once from the Nine Prisons Platform came a roaring like surging tides, each cry louder than the last, each wave higher than the one before; amid an earth-shaking thunder, a vast ocean of blood and qi poured forth, filled the heavenly prison, and turned it into a sea of blood and qi.

Boom — A heavenly palace leapt out from the sea of blood and qi of the Nine Prisons Platform and settled upon its surface, ten thousand beams of dao light shooting from that palace in every direction.

At the same instant, one heavenly palace after another came leaping out as well, pressing down upon the sea of blood and qi and joining into a single heavenly court, a thousand palaces and ten thousand halls arrayed in ordered splendor. Shen Mu's figure rose slowly from the sea of blood and qi, his body towering, his bearing vigorous yet composed, as he walked slowly out of that sea.

Within him, nearly two thousand ancient god imprints dwelt in the orifices of his flesh, spirit clear and Dao bright, the great Dao pure and undivided.

This was a phenomenon he had never known before.

His understanding of the ancient gods' great Dao came chiefly from the records of the Archive Pavilion, supplemented by the analysis of microscopic divination arts and by the Great Emperor's Daluo Supreme Divine Consciousness.

By these means he had forged nearly two thousand ancient god imprints and stored them in the orifices of his flesh to strengthen his body; yet those imprints were all incomplete, their great Dao impure.

The Daluo Supreme Divine Consciousness above all — he had not received it as a transmission from the Great Emperor, but had refined the Great Emperor's consciousness and seized his memories by force; and never having seen those ancient gods lost to history, he could not refine his flesh to the Great Emperor's level.

But this time, after the prison locked his dao heart and the dao heart was recast, the great Dao stored within those ancient god imprints was baptized as well; his various comprehensions deepened, and his sense of the Dao grew purer.

Though his flesh still fell far short of the Great Emperor at his peak, he now possessed the potential to stand abreast of the Great Emperor — even to surpass him.

His primary primordial spirit rose, boundless and vast, enthroned in the heavenly court, while one subordinate primordial spirit after another flew out and settled into its own heavenly palace.

The primary primordial spirit commanded the subordinate spirits as a great emperor who rules heaven and earth commands the sovereign lords who guard the many daos and the many realms. The sea of blood and qi seethed, then gradually rose and merged into his flesh.

Shen Mu lowered his head and looked toward the Nine Prisons Platform: the Ninth Prison appeared utterly empty, and yet in his eyes he saw the dao heart that had once been locked there.

The Ninth Prison lay beneath his feet; and yet in the Ninth Prison within his heart, he was still striving onward there, his steps firm, measuring out his own inch-square heart one step at a time.

Enlightenment came to him: though he had leapt free of the Nine Prisons Platform, his dao heart was still within that prison, ceaselessly tempered.

"The world of men is one great cage; every person is in prison, pressing onward through the grind.