Chapter 559 — The Peak of This Life
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"Stranger still, when I performed the Soul-Drawing Charm, many phrases of the demonic tongue I had never learned came surging up in my mind. .
.
" Shen Mu frowned. Those strange impressions still lingered in his head—a language of extreme antiquity.
Suddenly his heart stirred, and he manifested the true form of the Zhen Star Lord, a human head upon a serpent's body, with the Heaven-Bearing Gate appearing behind him and the phantom of an ancient scroll taking shape in his hand. Shen Mu steadied himself and reached out to lift the phantom scroll. As its writing fell into his eyes, he felt the bird-seal and worm scripts on the page recombining at lightning speed; one after another the most bizarre glyphs turned familiar, until every outlandish character was engraved upon his heart!
Shen Mu's face went blank.
This was the language of Youdu, the script of Youdu—he could not read it at all! That scoundrel the Dutian Demon King knew a little of the Youdu tongue and had once taught him a single phrase, the Heaven-Bearing Gate, and back then the Dutian Demon King had deceived him besides, so that Shen Mu had nearly died in Youdu.
As for the writing in this book, the Dutian Demon King had never taught him a word of it.
Yet now he understood every script in the ancient volume without being taught, grasped it without instruction, as though he had mastered it long ago! "This ill-omened place is truly uncanny.
I could not read this book's writing before, yet now I can! The words on the first page resemble a cultivation art, yet are not quite a method of practice; they speak of strange knowledge concerning souls and spirits, yet it is not quite knowledge either—it is more like a divine power. . .
" Shen Mu was utterly astonished. The Youdu language of this scroll was too strange; never before had he seen writing so bizarre—like a cultivation art yet not one, like knowledge yet not knowledge, like a divine power yet not a divine power.
He hesitated a moment, but in the end could not resist and read aloud the words on the first page. From his mouth came a cadenced intonation, obscure and profound, carrying a wondrous rhythm.
These words could not be rendered in the speech of the human race, for human language held no vocabulary for such things—could not even convey their meaning. Only in the Youdu tongue could their import be expressed. The moment Shen Mu read the first line, he felt his soul shudder; the vital qi in his body underwent a strange transformation, turning into demonic qi, while all around, gusts of dark wind rose abruptly, mournful clouds gathered bleak and gray, and the surrounding marsh churned with spray.
Shen Mu hastily stopped and glanced about; everything returned to what it had been. He read on. Wind and clouds shifted again; the water of the marsh boiled as if a pot had overturned, bubbling and gurgling, while above his head the mournful clouds massed into a turning vortex.
Demonic qi came surging from all eight directions, and suddenly one stream of it, like a flood dragon trailing its tail, came hanging down from the vortex's center.
Shen Mu's mind reeled—that demonic qi had already entered through the point between his brows into his Primal Embryo Divine Treasury. Following his voice, it fused with his spirit embryo, and at once the spirit embryo fed it back in return; the demonic qi rolled on in mighty torrents, rushing through his Five Luminaries Divine Treasury and his other divine treasuries, until even the sun, the moon, and the constellations within were stained by it and dimmed to obscurity. As Shen Mu read on, one skeleton after another abruptly rose from the marsh around him, and from beneath the mire many corpses crawled out as well. Startled, he hurriedly stopped, closed the ancient scroll, dismissed the true form of the Zhen Star Lord, and swept a wary gaze over his surroundings.