Chapter 687 — Fishing the Sun on a Hook, and Binding It Again
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
Yan Jingjing laughed until she had no strength left; her body went limp and she tumbled into the emerald grass, waving her arms and kicking her legs about like a cat afraid of being tickled. Shen Mu could not bring himself to tickle her further, and lay down as well.
The two of them lay in the grass. Shen Mu propped his chin on one hand and gazed at the girl beside him; under his gaze her cheeks flushed red and her heart pounded, and she set her hands and feet down meekly, not daring to move a muscle.
"The mood's turned ambiguous..." The two fish in the basket quietly poked their heads out again and peered toward the grass.
Yan Jingjing grew more and more flustered, and said in a voice as faint as a mosquito's: "We're almost at the Dawn Spring..."
"Yes!"
Shen Mu scrambled up in a fluster, pulled the girl to her feet, and hurried after the Old Angler.
The two fish sank back to the bottom of the basket. The male fish said listlessly, "He'll be a bachelor all his life. There's no hope for him."
When they reached the Dawn Spring, the Sun-Herding Clan Chief hurried out to welcome them. The Old Angler did not know him, nor he the Old Angler, and Shen Mu and Yan Jingjing hastily made the introductions.
When the Sun-Herding Clan Chief heard that this was another Heavenly Master, he was filled with astonishment and doubt: "The Heavenly Masters of the Kaihuang era — one cuts firewood, one fishes. How are they both so common? There's not the least sense of lofty eminence about them."
The Old Angler came to the well, set down his little folding stool, smoothed out his fishing line, and said, "How many suns do you want?"
The Clan Chief said hastily, "We don't yet know how many Dawn Boats Jingping can build, and with only the boats and no Sun Guardian, I fear such treasure ships cannot be piloted at all."
The Old Angler thought it over and said, "I'll fish up a few suns and tether them for you, to be used when you have need of them."
The Clan Chief was struck dumb, and stammered, "Tether... suns..."
The Old Angler paid him no more heed. He lowered line and hook into the Dawn Spring, and the two little red fish leaped from his basket. One of them opened its mouth, took the hook between its jaws, and swam off into the depths of the spring, drawing the line behind it, while the other little red fish swam to and fro in the dazzling well, seemingly not feeling the heat in the slightest.
Shen Mu had long since grown numb to it. Two little red fish that could leap and frolic out of water and speak in human tongues were already shocking enough to stagger the world; that one of them could take a hook in its mouth and swim into the unimaginable heat of the Dawn Spring was more staggering still.
And yet the Desolate Ruins seemed to be full of such world-staggering things. In the Surging River, big fish often leaped ashore and went racing off on their legs, faster than an ordinary divine-power cultivator.
In years of drought, the fish of the Desolate Ruins would even summon clouds and call down rain, riding wind and storm to move house, shifting from dried-up pools to other places rich in water.
He stood at the well and looked down. The little red fish was swimming deeper into the Dawn Spring with hook and line, but its body was growing larger and larger — several hundred zhang long at the very least — and its speed was increasing as well. Soon it came to where the god-made suns lay in heaps upon heaps; there it spat out the hook and used it to snag one of the suns.
The Old Angler reeled in. After a moment, a sun of astonishing size was hauled up.
Behind the Old Angler there suddenly appeared an immeasurably vast primordial spirit. It spread its arms, took the god-made sun in both hands and began to knead it, and the sun was rubbed smaller and smaller.
Before long the sun had been kneaded into a ball the size of a watermelon. The Old Angler tied it with a fine cord and hung it beside the well, then went on fishing.