Chapter 600 — How Could This Be
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
Eight thousand swords became one blade of light, and with the thrust of his finger that blade-light kindled to immeasurable intensity, all his strength and all his energy gathered into it, and stabbed to meet the nine-headed phoenix. With a swish, the sword-light met the Nine Phoenix.
The beam was thick as a pillar when it burst from Shen Mu's fingertip, but after it left his sword finger it became infinitely fine, a needle of frigid light. And yet, when looked at closely, that needle of light seemed to harbor the great visions of a thousand worlds.
His first move in the Tribulation Sword was called the Sword That Opens Tribulation. The strike centered on the Carefree Sword, whose body had eight faces; upon those eight faces blazed the runes of Shen Mu's Mystic Body Three-Elixir Art, radiant on every side.
The sword-light cast the runes across the sub-swords one by one, and the power of each was kindled, the light rebounding from one sub-sword to the next, for every blade was an eight-sided mirror; in a bare breath all eight thousand stood alight, driving every last ounce of their power!
The positions of the eight thousand swords changed ceaselessly too, each tracing a different path, until at last all their force was gathered into the Carefree Sword. Such was the secret of the Sword That Opens Tribulation.
On the surface, Shen Mu had done no more than touch his brow and thrust one sword — the very picture of simplicity.
Yet behind that simple-looking strike lay his lifelong comprehension of cultivation, his physical body, his primordial spirit, his Dao arts and divine powers, everything he possessed. The Butcher and Fu Riluo had both spoken of reducing the myriad to the one; why did Shen Mu feel those words so keenly?
Because he had already reached that very stage! Compared with Qi Jiuyi's great divine art, which was slow to launch and needed time to prepare, Shen Mu's great divine art — his Tribulation Sword — fired with extraordinary speed! Such was the difference between a method created for oneself and one learned from another.
Shen Mu had set foot on the road where one's own method carries one into the Dao; since he had created the Tribulation Sword himself, his reaction was incomparably swift.
Zhe Huali's road was the blade; his knife techniques were his own creation, but his cultivation method was another's — he had studied Luo Wushuang's art and Fu Riluo's demonic method alike — and so his Dao-entering swordplay was a trace slower than Shen Mu's.
But even that trace slower was faster than Qi Jiuyi's great divine art. What set Qi Jiuyi above them both was that his method was the Heavenly Court's Imperial Throne method; the might of its divine arts was crushingly matchless, rarely seen in the world — in raw power alone it passed any number of True God methods!
But this great divine art of his was split in two: the Nine Phoenixes attacked Shen Mu, the Cangwu tree harried Zhe Huali, and the force of the move was likewise halved!
Shrrrk! Shen Mu's blade-light pierced the nine-headed phoenix through the skulls; the Carefree Sword drove straight through the body that the divine art had formed.
The phoenix looked small, yet it was composed of countless lesser divine arts, and all the arts forming its body burst out at once!
But the eight-thousand-sword might hidden within Shen Mu's thrust burst out with equal violence: eight thousand infinitesimal swords danced through amplitudes invisible to the naked eye, each executing a different sword move, slashing the divine arts within the phoenix's frame to ribbons. In one brief moment of collision, the nine-headed phoenix was annihilated, and the needle-fine sword-light flew straight for Qi Jiuyi.
His great divine art broken, Qi Jiuyi grunted dully.