Chapter 632 — Where I Stand, There Is Youdu
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
"Who are you?
" Shen Mu cried out in alarm.
From his own mouth came a voice, clear and ringing, yet laced with an innocent evil: "I am—" Above his head the Buddha's great hand had already come pressing down, and all at once Shen Mu felt another "self" within him stirring awake; the sensation was so strange that he felt himself split in two. "—Shen Fengqing!
" The moment the voice fell, Shen Mu's original consciousness dropped to second place and became a mere onlooker.
More terrifying still, as that other "self" emerged, a power welling up from who knew where flooded his body in an instant, so vast, so dreadful, so evil that Shen Mu's former cultivation, with his consciousness, could only hold fast in one small corner and watch the wickedness fill him to the brim.
"The primal spirits I have stolen are still too few, nowhere near enough to break Earth Lord's seal. Earth Lord, that great villain. .
. but if I kill this Buddha, I can break more seals!
" Shen Mu heard a strange, arrogant infant's voice issue from himself, a voice bearing evil, a chilling evil; the tongue it spoke was the speech of Youdu, freighted with a strange sorcery, flaunting, utterly fearless, and at once boundless in its greed, as though it were the union of every base desire. "Where my body stands, there is Youdu—" Shen Mu saw darkness spread out from within his own body and taint the Great Brahma Heaven, the highest heaven of the Buddhist realm. In the Great Brahma Heaven there was eternal day, golden radiance like a sea, and now a great swath of that golden sea went suddenly dim.
As though a drop of ink had fallen into a basin of clear water, the darkness invaded; the golden sea was polluted and turned black, and the reach of the darkness grew ever wider.
The supreme holy ground of the Buddhist realm was transforming into Youdu. The Buddha's great hand had already descended, blazing with Buddha-light, but in the next breath it was swallowed by the darkness.
That Buddha cried out in shock and drew his hand back from the black demonic breath of Youdu, and saw that the plump, golden Buddha-hand had turned to bare white bone, the flesh upon it gone as though it had flown away.
It was a divine power utterly unlike those of Jingping, of Taihuang Heaven, of the Buddhist realm or the Heavenly Court: a power that held death in its grip and seized the life-force of all that existed to make it its own.
Shen Mu sprang up, laughing heartily, and pressed his five splayed fingers down onto that Buddha's head.
A thunderous boom! A violent shock rolled out; the Buddha was crushed bodily onto a golden island, and the island burst apart with a roar, the heavens collapsing and the earth splitting.
Shen Mu saw that his own body, too, was undergoing a wondrous change: it was growing with frantic speed, taller and taller, larger and larger, while his years seemed steadily to recede, so that he grew ever younger, ever more like a small child. Fortunately the garments forged for him by Yu Zhaoqing, chieftain of the Tianyu clan, were no common things, made from the finest stuff of the Tianyu clan and a formidable yuan-arm spirit treasure in their own right, able to grow and shrink with his fleshly body.
By now he stood more than ten zhang tall, yet his years had shrunk back to the look of four or five, so that he seemed a lovely little boy, clear as snow.
Yet lovely as this boy looked, his strength was without limit and his savagery without bottom, and he smashed that Buddha's skull almost to a pulp.
Nor was that all: with one hand the "little boy" hoisted the Buddha up into the air, opened his mouth, and drew a great breath.