Chapter 573 — Elder Brother Makes His Move and Binds the Flood Dragon
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
The divine dragon was slightly taken aback; the pupils of its dragon eyes kept contracting, narrowing, focusing, and came to rest upon Shen Mu.
Its eyes were immense beyond measure. Were Shen Mu to walk up before it and stand upon its lower eyelid, he could not have reached the upper lid with both arms stretched high.
To be watched by those two dragon eyes was no comfortable thing.
The divine dragon's gaze brimmed with majesty, and that dragon-majesty chilled a man to the marrow, filling his heart with awe and with dread.
Shen Mu seemed not to notice at all. He paced slowly, surveying the furnishings within the shrine. There were many murals in the great hall, but most had been destroyed.
The dragon race loved grandeur and great deeds, and delighted in carving their exploits upon murals; they adorned their palaces sumptuously, all glittering gold, and with those murals recounting their glorious achievements, dwelling in such a place was a joy to body and mind alike.
In this hall the murals had been destroyed, and worse, the palace's treasures had been plundered clean. Incense burners and screens, jade couches and teapots, paintings, calligraphy, zithers and chess sets, all of it carried off; he even saw on the walls pit after pit left behind where night-pearls had been pried out. Nor was that all: many floor tiles were missing from the hall, and judging by the run of the remaining tiles, the place prised open was precisely the center of the hall, where there should have been an exquisite picture proclaiming the wealth and the rank of the hall's master.
Those tiles had been levered away as well, exposing the bare stone beneath, glaring to the eye.
The exposed stones were covered in runes. Shen Mu studied them closely for a while, and left them untouched.
"So the one who plotted against me is your founding patriarch?" the divine dragon asked, its voice heavy with wrath.
"Not my patriarch. My eldest senior brother."
Shen Mu searched meticulously, hoping to turn up one or two treasures the founding patriarch of the Heaven Sage Sect had carelessly left behind, and at last made the rueful discovery that if this founding senior brother had gone to scrub backs in a Jingping bathhouse, his business would surely have thrived.
The place had been scrubbed so spotless by the founding patriarch, scraped so thoroughly, that nothing worth carrying off could be found.
Unless, that was, Shen Mu took for himself the founding patriarch's great cauldron and the ten li of yellow sand, or dismantled this hall and carried it away, which was impossible, for hall and cauldron alike were treasures meant to suppress the divine dragon.
"In the ten li of yellow sand, I saw the star-sand gather and become a Star-Sand Evil Eye. The sequence of its stars, the way their starlight links them, and the very nature and composition of those stars are precisely the divine-power array of my Heaven Sage Sect's Great Nurturing Netherworld Demon Sutra."
Having searched a long while to no avail, Shen Mu finally met the dragon's gaze and said, "The moment I saw that, it came to me in a flash: this Ten-Li Star-Sand Tribulation Array is something I have already learned. It lies hidden within the Great Nurturing Netherworld Demon Sutra. And once I grasped that, though the array can strangle a true god, it became far simpler for me, which is why I could walk out of it alive."
He circled the chain-bound dragon twice, unhurried, and said, "Yet even then I dared not be certain whether this killing array had been left by my senior brother, so after I walked out of the Star-Sand Tribulation Array, I went to examine closely the divine markings on the cliff walls and the demon script upon the chains."