Chapter 232 — The Old Man's Clay Jar
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"It hurts.
.
. it hurts so much!
" Shen Mu came down to the ground, every limb and bone in his body wracked with agony, the pain so sharp he kept drawing hissing breaths through his teeth. The monk's Vajra Unconquerable Art had made his body so hard that even the Yuan Soldiers could scarcely wound him, and all manner of divine arts were nearly useless against him, so that Shen Mu had fought him with the greatest difficulty. Halfwit Monk's attacks too had been terrifying in their force, tearing open Shen Mu's flesh and skin; the nine golden rings in particular had nearly smashed his skull to pieces.
Luckily the monk's methods of attack were fairly simple, and in the end he had still died by Shen Mu's hand.
"A divine arts practitioner of the Six Harmonies realm is still quite formidable. He can't be underestimated.
" Shen Mu rubbed the lump on his forehead, hissing cold breath through his teeth, and set the Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art to work, quickening blood and qi lest blood congeal into bruises. Two of the ribs in his chest had also been broken, and his back was a gory mess, the wound left when Halfwit Monk had pressed down on him with a Sumeru Seal.
The Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art was excellent for healing wounds, but it still could not compare with efficacious elixirs; fortunately these injuries were not enough to kill him. "For now I had best go back to the village first, and once my wounds are healed, go look for the Xuanliao Demon Ape.
" Shen Mu set his broken ribs for himself, left the monk's corpse where it lay — in the Barren Ruins there was no rule that corpses must be buried, and a corpse would soon be eaten by wild beasts drawn by the smell of blood, leaving at most bones behind.
If luck was bad, not even the bones would remain. He returned to the village, gathered several kinds of spirit herbs from the herb plot outside it, refined two batches of spirit pills, one for external wounds and one for internal, then asked the Dragon Qilin for a little dragon saliva to mix the medicine with. Seeing him beaten to such a state, the Dragon Qilin looked astonished, but asked no questions.
This Dragon Qilin, just as in the Imperial Academy, sat squatting at the village entrance guarding the gate, motionless.
Shen Mu reckoned that this fellow was a gatekeeper in name only, and in truth was simply lazy — too lazy to move. The Dutian Demon King still stood there stiffly; the Dragon Qilin was too lazy to move, while he had been fixed in place by the Deaf Elder and could not move at all. Shen Mu rested and nursed his wounds in peace.
When night came, the Deaf Elder still had not returned, nor had anyone else in the village returned.
By the next day, the village head and the others still had not come back. Shen Mu's lungs and viscera still pained him, and he could not draw deep breaths, but the ribs and the wound on his back had already healed.
"If I want the injury to my lungs and viscera to heal faster, the best way is to steam it, to let the medicinal vapor enter them. But there is no one to tend the fire for me.
.
. " The youth set the Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art to work, walking slowly about, breathing in and out gradually, so that the hidden injury in his lungs would heal the faster.
Suddenly a question came to him, and he thought: "Now that the New Year has passed, am I fifteen or sixteen? " The people of the village had always argued over his age; the village head and Granny had quarreled about it several times, and none could say for certain.
Granny Zhu had found Shen Mu in the spring, a babe in swaddling clothes two or three months old. Granny Zhu held that Shen Mu had been born before the New Year, but the village head held that he had been born after it. If born before the New Year, Shen Mu was sixteen; if after, he was fifteen.