Chapter 828 — Proud Steeds and Carved Chariots, Fragrance Filling the Road
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
"Flowers that are not flowers, mist that is not mist.
It comes at midnight, and at dawn it goes.
. . " Shen Mu was lost in thought, savoring the verse again and again.
A million years ago, at the grand feast by the Jade Pool, he and Emperor Kai had once studied alongside Ling Heavenly Venerable a divine power that could keep matter unchanging, neither increasing nor decreasing; their time together had not been long, yet even so they had groped their way onto a vague and shadowy road. Ling Heavenly Venerable, of course, had been the driving force of that research; he and Emperor Kai were only her assistants, helping her make deductions and imparting to her the art of creation.
Even so, Shen Mu knew Ling Heavenly Venerable's findings inside and out.
It was then that the foundation of her divine power was laid; through the long ages that followed, it was she alone who deduced and perfected that art.
From the ghost ship, it was clear that when Ling Heavenly Venerable wielded this divine power she had not yet perfected it, and so she left behind a flaw: the unchanging constant, thirty-six.
Each time this ship resets space and time, it leaves behind a flaw, and that flaw produces three outcomes. First, it fuses the living and the nonliving aboard the ship into monsters neither human nor thing — which is why so many who boarded have grown fused into the ship's very hull.
Second, the divine power fuses with the ship, and the ship fuses with life, until the power and the ship have become a strange living entity.
This entity wanders through thirty-six different eras, and it attacks any among the boarders capable of threatening it.
Third, the ship cycles through thirty-six different eras, and that cycling turns the boarders to Void, until at last they become neither living nor dead, invisible, imperceptible. To the boarders this was an eerie, terrifying divine power; but to Ling Heavenly Venerable it was the result of her own imperfect art.
To them, uncanny; to her, a flaw — and not one she had intended. The time when Ling Heavenly Venerable left this poem must have been in later years, when she boarded the ship again, sensed the imperfection of her art, and left the poem behind, speaking in verse of the flaw within her divine power. The boarders' hope for survival does not lie in comprehending Ling Heavenly Venerable's divine power, but in seeking life from the very flaw in it — and breaking that power!
Shen Mu dimly grasped a direction for breaking this divine power, but the feeling was too hazy; for a moment he could not think it through. Suddenly, a dreadful throb came from behind the hall.
They raced around the great hall and saw the Scarlet Bright Divine Son locked in battle with the two attendants of Prince Qiuming! The bodies of the Scarlet Bright Divine Son and those two divines were already half turned to Void; flesh and primal spirit alike were hazy and indistinct, as if unreal — yet their fighting strength remained utterly terrifying.
After Shen Mu imparted to him the Scarlet Emperor's Three Primordial Spirits' Undying Divine Consciousness, the Scarlet Bright Divine Son at last made good his weakness; his primal spirit too was cultivated into a three-headed, six-armed form, and paired with the Bright Emperor's Flawless Creation Mystic Art, he was simply slaughtering gods before him and Buddhas behind him.
Yet the two divines who had come with Prince Qiuming were no trifling matter either, and one of them, whose silver rope suspended the moon, had left a deep impression on Shen Mu. The silver rope was a hundred thousand li long, hanging down from the moon; once it touched the ground, that divine had gathered it into his sleeve.
Now he stirred the silver rope — though it was no longer a rope but a whip. The silver whip lengthened and shortened at will, with techniques of shake, chop, uplift, sweep, coil, circle, loop, and thrust; and its transformations did not end there.