Chapter 534 — Jade Face Like a Painting, Sword Like a Rainbow
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 4 of 4
A man at fifty, his merit yet unearned, stands alone with his saber, gazing on the eight wastes. After the calamity, the hero is the people's prayer; every step he walks, smoke the whole way! On that vast, bloody battlefield, Zaifu's saber art suddenly came fiercely alive, mirroring the great calamity of this world. His saber strokes grew faster and faster, and all at once the saber light scattered; wind and rain, the great sun, the face of the sea, all vanished.
Shen Mu pressed two fingers together into a sword, and his quaking vital qi became sword-threads; he lifted lightly and wiped slowly, the sword art infinitely fine, and then suddenly the sword strokes grew faster and faster, and in the blink of an eye a long sword stretched across the sky, like a silver serpent-dragon dancing wild above the altar.
Shen Mu paced the altar with sword in hand, the sword light hissing across the vast empty sky, faster and faster, more and more urgent. The calamity of this world of Taihuang Heaven had stirred something in his heart, and unconsciously he released his moods and feelings through his sword art and his own vital qi.
The third stance of the Sword Diagram: the Sovereign's Calamity Stirs.
Yet at the very fiercest moment of the calamity's eruption, Shen Mu suddenly dispersed all the sword light. His sword-fingers stabbed abruptly at the point between his brows, a point not only between his brows, but at the point between the brows of the spirit fetus and the primordial spirit. All his spirit, all his sword qi, gathered into that single finger. He had comprehended the calamity.
Calamity is disaster; it is the ten thousand peoples struggling to survive in disaster, seeking the hope of life amid hellish suffering; it is a hero like Zaifu cleaving hope out with his saber; it is a Human Sovereign like Lizheng, hacking a trail through the wilds, struggling to live; and it is also the ten thousand peoples struggling and sinking behind the hero.
Flesh and blood, buried bones. His two fingers stabbed forward, one sword like a rainbow, spanning ten li of empty sky. The light of one and a half suns in the heavens went wholly dim, leaving only that single streak of sword light. As that sword thrust out, Shen Mu stood blankly on the altar.
With that one sword he had abandoned Lizheng's Sword Diagram entirely; and all at once he felt that he had a road of his own.