Chapter 334 — The Divine Pupil Reappears in the World
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
The Jingping Imperial Preceptor probed, "Could the Holy Sect Master offer a discount?"
Shen Mu made a quick reckoning, then smiled. "After the Loulan Golden Palace was taken, the Imperial Preceptor promised me my pick of a hundred treasures. I can fund the wages of the sect followers myself."
The Jingping Imperial Preceptor meant to haggle further, but Shen Mu smiled and said, "Heavenly King, I have put in my own labor and strength without asking for wages; to call upon the second greatest artisan under heaven, the price is hardly small! And I am, besides, the Holy Sect Master of the Heavenly Sacred Sect!"
The Jingping Imperial Preceptor sighed. "I should never have agreed to let you be the Heavenly King of the Heavenly Sacred Sect. Now my hands are tied and I cannot bargain. This matter I must report to the emperor and let him decide. In recent years Jingping has swallowed up the other nations and destroyed many sects, and the treasury does hold a little divine gold and divine material — but the emperor's consent is needed. Wait a dozen days or so, and the imperial decree will come down."
Shen Mu turned away to help forge the Divine Heaven Rings. As for divine gold and divine materials, he was not worried; he saw nothing especially precious in them. When he had forged his own sword elixir, he had used a good deal of such material, all of it taken from the Nether Demon Sect's treasure vault — though he had in turn handed over all the various sect-guarding treasures on his person to the Nether Demon Sect's vault.
Together with the Ministry of Works and the assembled scholars of the Grand Academy, he forged the Divine Heaven Rings, and the work went quickly indeed. Speed was the soul of war; if only the Divine Heaven Rings were forged, more than seventeen thousand of them would be needed — a vast undertaking in itself.
The Divine Heaven Rings linked the array patterns of the true-essence cannon, able to bind the true-essence beam at the center of the barrel without touching the bore, gathering the beam into a thickness like the mouth of a bowl; thus the bore would not heat, and neither mystic-gold fatigue nor heat decay would occur.
The original true-essence cannon's beam had been as thick as a water bucket; now it became as thick as a bowl's mouth. Though the area of attack shrank, the range increased greatly, and the cannon could be fired at will without fear of bursting, turning the tower ship into a true warship of the air.
In truth, the Divine Heaven Rings were not what improved the true-essence cannon the most. In the Ninefold Heaven Gazing Eye Art, the Soaring Heaven Eye was only the most basic of the eye arts; the other eight were all far stronger than the Soaring Heaven Eye.
The strongest was the ninth, the Fire Heaven Eye.
But the Soaring Heaven Eye's array patterns were the simplest, the easiest to learn, the easiest to forge, and required the fewest materials; so Shen Mu taught the others only the Soaring Heaven Eye's array patterns.
Had it been the Fire Heaven Eye, even Shen Mu could not forge a single Fire Heaven Ring in ten days or half a month — the Fire Heaven Ring's array patterns were far too complex. With Fire Heaven Rings, the true-essence beam would likely be compressed into a thread finer than a needle, and its range would rise enormously again. But the energy needed to fire the true-essence cannon would also be immense; the national treasury likely could not bear it.
"If Fire Heaven Rings could be forged, gathering light into threads and forming a killing array, it would truly be indestructible — used to guard a holy land, no army of a thousand legions could break through!"
Shen Mu calculated how much money such a guardian array would cost, and at once his spirits fell. The Heavenly Sacred Sect could afford to build it, but not to use it; the medicinal stones needed to activate and sustain the array were far too many.