Chapter 704 — Climbing onto a Giant's Shoulder
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
Xu Shenghua halted and recited the Youdu tongue at the starving ghoul Shen Mu had captured. The ghoul opened its mouth and gave a shrill, wretched howl; black sand poured ceaselessly from within it, while more black sand surged in from outside.
The First Ancestor Human Emperor borrowed the Book of Youdu from Shen Mu and used his own vital essence to imitate the Youdu script, seeking to improve Shen Mu's art.
Yama, who had studied the divine arts of Youdu, simply altered Shen Mu's art outright.
The Woodcutter Sage, meanwhile, paced around Ning Jin, the Divine Man of the Kaihuang Era, studying him without pause.
Each was lost in his own thoughts, each held a different view, and all of them were tampering with Shen Mu's art.
Only Yan Jingjing, who had truly never studied such things, could do nothing but watch these strange men meekly.
Shen Mu watched them with a dark face. In the past it had always been he who tampered with other people's arts; now at last he knew what it felt like to have his own tampered with.
A long while passed. Some walked, some lay down, some sat, some ran, all pondering bitterly.
The Imperial Preceptor Jingping drew bizarre runes in the sand by the sea; the First Ancestor wrote and sketched in the air with his vital essence; Xu Shenghua took out his Ruler and his Arithmetic Elemental Soldiers and calculated at furious speed, writing strange equations on the ground one after another, trying to solve them.
Behind Yama floated a great metal ring, on which runes flickered in and out of being.
The Woodcutter Sage took from Ning Jin's neck the pendant Shen Mu had forged for him, then turned to examine the Heaven Dipper the Dark Son of Heaven had forged.
How much longer passed, no one knew. They gathered around the Heaven Dipper, each branding the void with his vital essence, and one magnificent symbol after another appeared in the air.
They were golden runes, and from them burst ceaselessly a golden light like grains of sand — like the black sand of souls, yet not black.
"What are they doing?" Lady Tianyin could no longer follow it either, and asked Shen Mu and Yan Jingjing in a whisper.
Shen Mu's expression was grave. He said in a low voice, "They are trying to sort out, from my art and from the Dark Son of Heaven's Heaven Dipper, some of the foundational runes of the Tianyin Realm's divine arts, and from there to deduce all of the foundational runes."
Lady Tianyin was briefly startled. "Foundational runes of the Tianyin Realm? There is such a thing?"
"You have never been to the outside world, my lady, have you? You do not know that most of the divine arts under heaven are built from foundational runes."
Shen Mu explained, "Wind, rain, thunder, lightning, cloud, mist, the stars of heaven, and Creation itself — every kind of divine art has its most fundamental structure, and these are the foundational runes. Take swordsmanship: swordsmanship has eighteen foundational sword moves. And your Tianyin Realm, my lady, is another world, different from the outside, with different rules. Its divine arts and Dao methods may be said to form a system of their own."
Yan Jingjing had been forced up into the divine realm by Xizhou, and her understanding of the foundations of Dao methods and divine arts was slight. Now she could not help listening closely and comprehending, making up for her own shortcomings.
"The art with which I would revive you, my lady, was born out of several great systems of divine arts — Youdu, Mingdu, Xuandu, Creation, the way of gods, the way of demons, the way of buddhas, the Daoist gate. It touches on the arts of all these systems. These are the great systems; the lesser systems within them are too many to count. Only by fusing so many systems of divine arts could I revive you."
Shen Mu went on, "But what I used were not the foundational runes of the Tianyin Realm. I used the knowledge of these systems of divine arts to imitate the Tianyin Realm's foundational runes."