Chapter 346 — So What?
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
It was the first time Shen Mu had ever seen Li Zheng so helpless, so utterly in despair. Held in his arms, the old man clutched at him like a drowning man at a straw, begging to be taken home — back to Yincan Village, back into that small, self-enclosed world of his.
He could not bring himself to imagine that this terrified, despairing old man was the very master who had taught him and raised him; nor had he ever thought that a being as powerful as Li Zheng could be struck down so easily.
Li Zheng had often said that he was too strong. Yet the old man who had spoken those words now saw every belief he held crumble and collapse into dust.
Li Zheng had been struck down once before. After that first defeat he had gone to Yincan Village and become a crippled old man, broken in heart and will. Had Grandpa Huo, Master Dan, the Silent Craftsman and the others not come to Yincan Village one after another, it was hard to imagine what he would have become.
Shen Mu still remembered how it had been when Master Dan and the rest all left the village, leaving Li Zheng alone there.
Dejected and listless, Li Zheng would sit at the village gate without moving, letting wind and rain beat on him, letting the darkness creep over him, letting his beard grow wild — too lazy even to shift his seat.
Unkempt, neither eating nor drinking, he seemed content to let himself rot away where he sat.
And the Li Zheng of the moment he was first struck down must have been even more dejected, even more listless than that. Back then he had been a failure through and through, every hope dead, all joy gone — nothing but a walking corpse!
And now, what had struck Li Zheng down was not his own failure, but the failure of the Human Sovereigns of every generation — indeed, of the founder of the Hall of Human Sovereigns, the first Human Sovereign himself!
The despair of that first Human Sovereign he felt as his own. Like a frightened child, he wanted only to flee back into his own world and curl up there, to lick his own wounds, or simply to rot and die.
Without having known such a defeat, one could scarcely comprehend what Li Zheng felt now.
Qingyou the Mountain Hermit watched from the side, pity on his face, and sighed. He had not meant to crush this old Human Sovereign so; it was Shen Mu, the new Human Sovereign, he had meant to strike — to give this green boy who did not know the height of the heavens or the depth of the earth a heavy, solid lesson, to make him understand that all his pursuits, all his duties, amounted in the end to nothing but a trifling joke, an emptiness, a dream!
He had not struck Shen Mu at all; instead he had struck his old friend down until his heart was ashes.
He and Li Zheng were old acquaintances; their paths had crossed in earlier years.
When Li Zheng had invited him to come down from the mountain in those days, he had agreed, and he had come down. But what of it? In the end he had dragged his battered body back to Little Jade Capital — his body covered in wounds, his heart scarred just as badly.
From then on his heart had gone cold, and all his hot blood had drained away.
In recent years he had read through the various records of Little Jade Capital. The more he learned of history, the deeper his understanding grew, the more every notion of his youth dissolved into smoke.
When Shen Mu came to see him, bringing the cultivation method that could repair the Divine Bridge and let him ascend to godhood, for one fleeting instant he had truly been moved; his stilled blood seemed to run hot again.
But it cooled again at once.
What of it?
Even if he repaired the Divine Bridge, could he be stronger than the immortal who had opened up this place in ages past?
Even if the old Human Sovereign repaired the Divine Bridge, what of it? Could he be stronger than the Human Sovereign who had founded the Hall of Human Sovereigns?
Even if Shen Mu became a god, what of it? Could Shen Mu be stronger than the Woodcutter Sage of their Tiansheng Sect?
"So what?"