Chapter 331 — One Meeting Outshines All the Splendors of the World
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
The middle-aged man on the gate tower was somewhat pale of face; clearly he carried wounds that had still not healed. This man was none other than the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping. In his single battle against a god he had been gravely hurt; Shen Mu and Fu Yuanqing, the Little Poison King, working together, had healed his injuries, but a wound dealt by a deity is a wound dealt by a deity, and he had not yet recovered fully.
It was precisely this chance that the Mandi Kingdom had seized to invade Jingping. Qingmen Pass was of vital consequence. The Imperial Preceptor knew well that Jingping had passed through two great calamities and that its vital strength was sorely spent; and beyond that, neither he nor Emperor Yanfeng had returned to the peak of their powers, and the Emperor's wounds were the heavier of the two.
Fearing that Mandi might drive straight through, he had marshaled his troops and his generals, and resolved to hold Qingmen Pass to the death.
He had even been willing to come in person to the battlefield, to command this confrontation with his own hand.
Li Zheng's drawn sword, the single stroke that stilled the strife of the field and shook the hearts of all, had not escaped his eyes.
In truth it was past the shaking of hearts. It was the power to turn a battlefield into a vast, swelling sea of blood, to overawe the armies of both sides utterly.
The lives of every soul on that field lay in his hand.
Such swordsmanship could hardly be called swordsmanship at all; it was profound and near to the Dao, and it showed the Imperial Preceptor a higher plane—the plane of the Sword Dao.
In that one move Li Zheng had loosed sword-light beyond all counting, and the most terrible thing was that every gleam traveled a different course, each one checking a martial artist or a wielder of divine powers—a thing all but impossible to accomplish.
On that field hundreds of thousands of troops charged and slaughtered; every man's cultivation and strength differed, the martial arts, techniques and divine powers they had trained all differed in greater or lesser degree, and the battle formations shifted with every breath. To hold them all in check at once, one would have to counter every divine power, every martial art, every primal weapon, every formation among them; the reckoning required was of an inconceivable order.
One who had reached such a level could already be called a god—a god of the sword!
"One sword unseals an emperor's sea of blood. I have seen this sword art before—upon the Painting Sage's painting."
The Imperial Preceptor narrowed his gaze and looked toward the Dragon Qilin. Shen Mu and the others stood upon its back; strong as they were, they had not yet earned a place in his eyes.
"In that painting I saw the utmost of swordsmanship. For two hundred years I studied the sword art of the man within it, and each time I contemplated it I gained something new—until one day I could find nothing new in it at all. And so I believed I had attained the level of the man in the painting."
Remembering that painting, the Imperial Preceptor's eyes searched for the man inside it, but found him not; then his gaze gathered and settled upon Shen Mu's back.
Shen Mu carried a medicine basket slung on his back, and in the basket sat a white-haired old man with neither hands nor feet.
This old man did not resemble the man in the painting of those years. The man in the painting was a Sword God, not so aged as this, his keen spirit bursting forth, like a blade—a blade that had just drunk blood.
But the old man in the basket was a cripple, a candle guttering in the wind, its flame ready at any moment to be snuffed out. Where was the high, proud bearing of the Sword God in the painting?
Yet the Imperial Preceptor was certain: this crippled old man was the Sword God of former days!
For his own first lessons in the sword had come from the Sword God in that painting.