Chapter 307 — A Trap Laid in Secret
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"Something is watching me!"
Shen Mu's heart lurched. He had not seen the two eyes hidden in the dark, yet he could feel that gaze.
He turned around and did not enter the bridge; instead he closed his eyes and paced slowly outside it, his steps neither hurried nor slow. Though his eyes were shut, he traced out a circle -- a perfect circle.
When the circle was complete, Shen Mu halted. He had walked it in order to calculate, from the pull of that gaze, the exact direction it came from -- a feat that drew on the spatial calculation techniques of the divinatory arts.
To anyone watching, he was merely pacing and brooding over some knotty problem; no one would have guessed he was pinpointing the position of a spy. True skill shows itself in the smallest details, and in this Shen Mu was already flawless.
Suddenly his mind and spirit shook. In those few steps he had calculated the source of the gaze -- even the distance between the two eyes!
What fixed on him was a single pair of eyes, and the space between them was two hundred and sixty-four zhang!
In other words, the dreadful being watching him from the dark had eyes more than two hundred and sixty zhang apart!
What a colossal existence!
"Could it be the creature of the Nether Capital that I frightened off with a phrase in its own tongue when I came aboard? Or is there something else lurking nearby?"
Shen Mu steadied himself, his face unchanged, betraying not the least alarm, and turned to walk toward the bridge.
He had already made up his mind: first explore the bridge, and if anything went wrong, leave at once -- not a moment's lingering!
The bridge was a ship's control room; from it one could steer the treasure ship's course and route, direct its battles, evade attacks. It was the heart of the vessel.
Once inside the bridge, once he found the geographic route map, he could steer the ship by that map.
Shen Mu's heart burned. This ship carried his dream of returning to the Land of No Sorrow.
He had barely stepped onto the bridge when a door suddenly opened and a Great Shaman blundered in, muddled and uncomprehending.
The two men saw each other and both started. The Great Shaman was a veteran of a hundred battles; he recovered in an instant, and without a word of parley he flipped open the gourd at his back. Countless wandering souls poured out and hurled themselves at Shen Mu!
At the same time golden light blazed from the Great Shaman's whole body as he roused the Shaman Sovereign's Louluo Sutra of the Golden Palace of Loulan. His flesh swelled and he became a one-eyed, four-armed giant.
His eye grew at the center of his face; his mouth, squeezed tiny by the eye, sat at the very bottom of his left cheek; his nose grew beneath his right cheek. He gripped vajra maces, and at a shake in the wind the segmented vajra shafts of the four maces spun with a shriek, like four slender pagodas, and came howling down at Shen Mu!
"A disciple of the Shaman Sovereign?"
At a glance Shen Mu recognized the Shaman Sovereign's Louluo Sutra. This man's cultivation was exceedingly deep, and the wandering souls spewing from the gourd at his back were a means of attacking the soul.
Great Shamans refined the souls of others into wandering souls, and every wandering soul was formidable. A wandering soul burrowed into a victim's body and gnawed at his soul; even an adept of the Six Harmonies realm could hardly withstand it.
If dozens of wandering souls came at once and invaded the body, an adept of the Six Harmonies realm would have no room to resist at all!
The greatest use of the soul gourd was on the battlefield: countless wandering souls darting this way and that, invading bodies, devouring the souls of the enemy host and leaving swaths of corpses behind -- invincible, and terrifying in its power!