Chapter 340 — The Iron-Blooded Frontier General
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
Had the Jingping Imperial Preceptor known the origins of those nine elders, he would have understood why Shen Mu possessed a vision and a breadth of mind that none of his peers could claim. The nine "elders" of Hidden Maimed Village were at once Shen Mu's closest kin and his teachers.
Among those nine were the present Tathagata; the one who had once been the Divine Spear; the Silent Artisan, first under heaven at forging treasures and rotten through and through; the Jade-Faced Poison King, a pill refiner once incomparably handsome and no less ruthless; and the Holy Maiden of the Nether Demon Cult, whose renown for her twin faces of god and demon shook the world.
There was also the Deaf Elder, whom the Jingping Imperial Preceptor revered as the Painting Sage; the Lame Elder, who could steal anything under heaven without ever failing, and who had slipped from his captors' grasp even after they cut off one of his legs; and the Butcher, hailed as the Heaven Blade who turned his saber against the heavens and did battle with the gods. And there was the Human Emperor who made an entire age shine — the Village Chief. Some of them had vast hearts; some were sentimental; some compassionate; some steady; some cunning; some skilled at hiding what lay within; some filled with heroic blood; some masters of scheme and design; and some ruthless.
Most of them, though, kept a heart of utter sincerity, a child's heart. It was because there was such a village, and such people, that Shen Mu could be raised into someone even this sage — one born but once in five hundred years — had to admire. Shen Mu himself felt nothing of the sort.
After he left Hidden Maimed Village he did not feel himself so extraordinary; he was, after all, a Tyrant Body, and any achievement was only natural, nothing to make a fuss over.
Yet in the eyes of others he was practically a monster of a prodigy: at such a young age, whether in poisoning or in refining pills to save lives, or in forging, thieving, calligraphy and painting, he stood among the finest hands under heaven. By contrast, Shen Mu's fighting strength was not what people prized; what he himself trained at hardest was raising his own power by every means he could, and this, in star-brilliant Jingping, drew little notice. Yet even that least remarkable fighting strength of his swept through his peers, and even Ban Gongcuo came off the worse against him time and again. When Shen Mu left Hidden Maimed Village his attainments in the arts of calculation were not high, but after he left the Desolate Ruins his skill in calculation advanced by leaps and bounds.
Even among the Daoist sect there were few who had thoroughly mastered the Supreme Mystery Calculation Classic, and though Shen Mu was no Daoist, he had studied that classic to the bone. He started late and came out ahead; few under heaven could surpass him in the arts of calculation.
The more one dealt with him, the more one felt how far from ordinary this small youth was. "To turn the contents of this golden book and precious scroll into a calculation model as quickly as possible, we need someone well versed in the arts of calculation to lend a hand. " Shen Mu put away the golden book and precious scroll and said, "The first art, the Magpie Bridge Art, I can measure out completely within a month and build its calculation model.
But the second art, the Mystic Guidance Art, and the third, the Divine Crossing Art, demand far too much calculation. If I were to sort it all out alone, I fear it would take more than a year — too long a delay. " The Jingping Imperial Preceptor, the Village Chief, and the Lame Elder all looked grave.
To build a calculation model, one had to measure every angle within the space of the golden book and precious scroll, using numbers to reconstruct point after point, coordinate after coordinate, of the three arts in space. This was of the utmost importance!