Chapter 510 — Teacher of Sages (Auspicious Year of the Dog!)
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 5
He and the Dragon-Qilin had been long apart; at their reunion they had been very affectionate, and he had even had a good cry, but this fat dragon kept clinging and rubbing until it had truly annoyed him, and he wished he could banish the brute to the ends of the earth.
"On this visit I also meant to see the Woodcutter Sage who transmitted the scripture upon the stone, and the Founding Grandmaster, and the Three Sage Kings.
" Shen Mu asked, "Grandmaster, are they in Fengdu as well?
" "The Three Sage Kings you will never see—their souls are rent, their spirits scattered. " The Young Grandmaster looked somber. "They died in battle.
On the point of death they forced the scripture of the stone upon the next generation of Cult Masters, but could not preserve their own souls, and so could not enter Fengdu.
I had thought I would meet the Founding Grandmaster here as well, yet I have not seen him; and the Woodcutter Sage is not in this place either. " Shen Mu was stunned. If not Fengdu, where else could the Woodcutter Sage and the Founding Grandmaster have gone?
The Woodcutter's physical body had turned into a stone statue, standing in Little Jade Capital, still gazing toward the Desolate Ruins; his primordial spirit had left his body and gone elsewhere.
The Founding Grandmaster had founded the sect and set down its teachings, but had never set down accomplishments, never become a Sage; he should not have become a god either, so he could hardly have escaped an old man's death—where, then, had he gone? The Young Grandmaster hesitated for a moment, then said, "You have beaten the successive Cult Masters. .
. " "Grandmaster, I am a Cult Master, and they are Cult Masters too. Why should I hold my head lower than theirs? I am the Human Emperor besides; my rank stood above theirs from the first.
To humble myself and fawn upon them—that I cannot do.
" Shen Mu said, "The Holy Sect has never known the order of elder and younger; whoever attains is the teacher.
They may be former Cult Masters, but a Cult Master has his backbone as well.
Had I not beaten them, they would have said my seat as Cult Master came by crooked means.
Now that they have been beaten, they have nothing more to say. Besides, in their hands the Holy Sect accomplished nothing and their ways rotted—they deserved a beating.
" The Young Grandmaster sighed, and asked with curiosity, "Without a physical body, how do you wield your magic power?
" Shen Mu's heart suddenly flooded with boundless grief, and he did not go on.
In his Sage Eye, the Grandmaster alive and well before him was nothing but a bare skeleton; and when he walked through the city of Fengdu, was not everything he saw the same?
The whole city of Fengdu, the crowds coming and going in their bustling press—all of them were skeletons and ghosts; only he walked through a city strewn with dried bones carrying flesh and blood upon him, solitary, a single shadow.
Even when he laughed and chatted with the successive Human Emperors in the Five Yang Hall, he was speaking with a score of bare skeletons; only at the boundary between life and death had he seen the successive Human Emperors take on flesh and blood.
Such was the scene Shen Mu saw with the Sage Eye passed down to him by the Blind Elder. What he saw was utterly different from what the ghosts of Fengdu saw.
The dead dwell in a world of the living, with life and death turned upside down—but the Grandmaster, the Human Emperors of every age, the Cult Masters of every age, were dead after all. Shen Mu did not speak of this. He was silent for a moment, then smiled: "Grandmaster, you carried out reform alongside the Jingping Imperial Teacher and the Emperor. Now that you have come to Fengdu, how is the reform to keep walking forward? " The Young Grandmaster walked shoulder to shoulder with him, to keep the Dragon-Qilin from crowding in again, and laughed: "Once the way of reform has begun, it does not end.