Chapter 308 — The Height of Baseness
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"Shen your grandpa!
" Shen Mu thrust his sword, and at once all eight thousand swords stirred; the flying blades pressed down upon Ban Gongcuo like an avalanche of toppled seas and mountains, while he snarled, "Shen Gongcuo, you and I cannot both live under heaven!
" "Shen Gongcuo?
Why does he call me Shen Gongcuo? " Ban Gongcuo was stunned, but had no time to think it over. He slapped his waist — at his waist, too, hung a taotie pouch.
The pouch opened, and a great banner sprang out into his hand; he spun and shook the banner, and from its long cloth countless locusts poured forth, buzzing in a circuit around his body before flying headlong into Shen Mu's rain of swords.
Those locusts actually veered of their own accord in midair, hurling themselves onto Shen Mu's flying swords and gnawing with crunch, crunch — yet they could not bite through. Shen Mu's forging of those eight thousand blades had come close to exhausting the Nether Demon Sect's finest materials; though most of the eight thousand swords were cast from dark gold, every blade had issued from the hand of Shen Mu, a grandmaster of artifact forging, and at the tempering he had added the choicest metals, so that the materials used were even better than those of a first-rank grand minister's belt-sword, such as the Chubao Sword. His cultivation was not high enough for him to raise the might of the eight thousand swords to the level of the Chubao Sword, but in hardness alone, every one of the eight thousand was no whit its inferior.
Shen Mu channeled his sword-force and slashed at the locusts; clang after clang rang out, sparks flew on every side — and still his swords could not wound these flying locusts. He was secretly startled: "This bastard has no end of treasures!
" His taotie pouch had been stolen from the Golden Palace of Loulan, and he had plundered that palace's treasures beyond counting; but Ban Gongcuo, as a Grand Venerable of the Golden Palace of Loulan, stood in rank far above even the Sorcerer Venerable, and possessed a private treasury of his own, one Shen Mu had not ransacked. His prime weapons were of many kinds.
These locusts, in truth, came from the Gu Hall within the Great Nurturing Nether Demon Sutra, the cultivation art of the Nether Demon Sect — rare treasures forged through the arts of gu-rearing. In one of his past lives he had been received into the Nether Demon Sect and learned the Great Nurturing Nether Demon Sutra; the Great Unifying Art he had failed to obtain, but every technique in the sutra he had studied.
The gu insects in his taotie pouch were likewise sect-suppressing treasures, and moreover had been fused with the soul-cultivation methods of the Golden Palace of Loulan: every kind of gu insect he had refined could attack not only an enemy's body but his very soul.
Within the Sorcerer-Venerable Louluo Scripture, the Golden Palace's cultivation art, there was a method of soul-worm attack, one that had itself drawn upon the gu-insect way of the Great Nurturing Nether Demon Sutra. His flying locusts were harder than iron all over, and in a former life he had refined them to be large or small at will; any ordinary prime weapon that met them would be eaten clean away, without a scrap remaining.
What was more, the locusts carried a sorcery of soul attack, well practiced at polluting another man's prime weapons; once a prime weapon was polluted by that sorcery, its master would lose control of it and be left at his mercy. Most important of all, other sect-suppressing treasures devoured one's cultivation to drive, whereas driving the flying locusts consumed very little — and so, the moment he came to blows with Shen Mu, he had brought out this treasure at once. He knew that Shen Mu's cultivation was unusually deep — deeper than his own, in fact; and although he himself had reincarnated to cultivate anew at a pace far beyond Shen Mu's, he still would not presume that he could press Shen Mu down by sheer depth of cultivation.