Chapter 506 — Blow After Blow Against the Ancestral Masters
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
On the bridge, the Human Emperors of past ages wore strange expressions. What Li Zheng had told them was that the Overlord Body was a fabrication of his own, a kindly lie invented to spur Shen Mu—a mere mortal body—to strive and struggle; and they had believed it.
Yet now Human Emperor Qi Kang, at the very same realm, had come off the worse in the first clash of blows, and after that had done nothing but take a beating. This did not seem like something a mortal body could achieve through hard work alone!
A mortal body—not even a spirit body—beating a Human Emperor black and blue through personal effort alone: was such a thing possible?
And so even they could not help but wonder whether an Overlord Body truly existed in this world.
On the bridge, the vital essence of Human Emperor Yishan gathered into a great hand, which raised a long finger, snow-white as jade, and poked at Human Emperor Qi Kang, who was drifting downstream.
Qi Kang lay sprawled on his back, eyes wide, gazing at the sky, motionless. Poked twice, he sank into the water and floated up again.
"Good disciple, have you been beaten into submission by your own grand-disciple?" Human Emperor Yishan asked, holding back laughter.
"Stop poking me, you old bastard. Let me have a moment's peace."
Qi Kang said sourly, "I've been beaten silly, not beaten into submission! I just want some quiet, to think about how I lost..."
Yishan burst out laughing, gloating. "Still say you're not submitting? You're floating, aren't you? Floating!"
Qi Kang rolled over and lay face-down on the water, spread-eagled, his rear end to the sky, letting the river carry him away.
Shen Mu could not help but worry. He called out loudly, "Grand Ancestral Master, don't choke on the water!"
Yishan laughed. "This boy—every time he loses a fight he's like this. Pay him no mind. He's wiping his tears. He just doesn't want you to see."
Shen Mu was uneasy. To beat his grand-master so badly that the man lay face-down in the river wiping his tears—this was, more or less, an outrageous transgression. As a youth raised by Yincan Village, he had always revered his masters and honored the Dao. Of course, the Lame Elder and the Silent Craftsman had taken their share of beatings from him when they crossed blows at the same realm.
"I may have struck a little too hard. Grand Ancestral Master, in truth my boxing is no match for yours—I only leaned on my deeper cultivation to press you down. There's no need to grieve!"
Shen Mu leaped onto the bridgehead and leaned over the railing, craning out toward Qi Kang drifting below. "I didn't mean to hit so hard! Just now, when I saw how extraordinarily strong my grand-master's skills were, I couldn't help but feel a competitive urge, and so I struck with everything I had. These days, when I meet experts of the same realm, I rarely go all out."
A note of bleakness entered his voice, and a shadow of sorrow. "After all, I am an Overlord Body. I had thought I might meet an expert who could contend with me at the same realm—who would have guessed that the skills of my ancestral masters and grand-masters would be a little... low? But that's not your fault!"
On the bridge, the Human Emperors of past ages struggled to contain their fury, watching as the young Human Emperor gazed down at the drifting Qi Kang with a look of longing. "If only my ancestral masters and grand-masters could have lived in the same age as I," he said. "If you had been born in the same era and advanced alongside me, we might have vied for supremacy. It is a pity your age was so ancient that you never caught up with the era of the reforms of Imperial Preceptor Jingping and myself, so that your divine abilities and dao arts have fallen out of date..."
Several of the old ancestors' knuckles cracked. They held themselves back from exploding in rage.
Human Emperor Lan Po smiled, grinding her teeth in secret—a creak, creak, creak that was truly chilling.