Chapter 885 — Attaining the Dao Amid Mortal Dust
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
In the Moon Palace, Shen Mu and Bai Qu'er truly were exchanging sword arts. Though her swordsmanship had come from Shen Mu, after forty thousand years of tempering it had made a leap in kind beyond the sword arts he had wielded in his youth. In those years, when Shen Mu and the Great Honored One and the rest had returned to forty thousand years past, in Bailong City, Shen Mu had displayed his sword arts before Bai Qu'er, Bai Qingfu, and the others; yet when the Shanghuang era was destroyed, of all who had witnessed those sword arts, only Bai Qu'er survived.
After Shen Mu departed, she alone guarded the people, seeking a place where the Shanghuang era might yet continue; every hardship and hazard fell on her shoulders alone. In her hands Shen Mu's sword arts slowly evolved, until they became a deity that sheltered the common folk. She was like another First Ancestor Human Sovereign, save that, unlike the First Ancestor, she was bolder in advance, keener in enterprise.
And she was only the daughter of the lord of Bailong City, no true-blooded dragon besides; the finest divine abilities she had ever learned were Shen Mu's sword arts and the Ancestral Dragon Grand Mystery Art he had taught her. Yet at that time Shen Mu had never had the leisure to pass his sword arts on to her in full, and the Ancestral Dragon Grand Mystery Art was itself incomplete.
She could only grope forward on her own, refining and improving; though Shen Mu's shadow yet lingered in her sword arts, the substance and the conception of them had long since strayed from his road. And it was this above all that moved Shen Mu to admiration and respect for her.
Only when sword arts take on the spirit of an age may they enter the Dao. This entering of the Dao was not the sort brought about by the Imperial Throne cultivation arts, nor the sort the Heavenly Court's "Yu Tianzun" achieved by using the arts of calculation to deconstruct the great-Dao runes of the ancient gods. To enter the Dao through the Imperial Throne arts depended on the Dao-practice of the art's founder, granting the cultivator supreme comprehension.
To enter the Dao by deconstructing the runes of the great Dao was to take a shortcut, letting one wield the great-Dao divine abilities of the ancient gods. Both were the trickster's way.
True entry into the Dao comes of being infected by the spirit of a great age: to set one's heart of the Dao within that age, to let it leap as the age leaps, to be stirred by the age's breath and pulse, to have one's heart of the Dao shaken by the churn of red-dust worldly affairs, and so to enter the Dao.
Such entry enters the red dust.
To enter the Dao through the red dust is the true entry into the Dao. The Village Elder's sword Dao was to dance his sword through setback after setback, mourning the fallen and broadening his heart.
The Imperial Preceptor of Jingping entered the Dao through reform and change, keen and enterprising.
The Butcher entered the Dao by refusing to bow to heaven, to earth, or to defeat, drawing his blade against the heavens, taking his joy in vengeance.
Shen Mu entered the Dao stirred by the First Ancestor Human Sovereign, bearing a heavy burden and a duty he had not the power to fulfill, striking out in fury on the battlefield of Taihuang Heaven, longing to change the calamitous fate of the mortal world.
Bai Qu'er's entry into the Dao was to use her sword to guard the people's peace, to protect the common folk, to give them the hope of living on. Her sword Dao halted only after the Shanghuang era had wholly ended and the people were safe, for then there was no more war, and the people of Shanghuang had their chance to breed and flourish. At that time her sword Dao had been cultivated to the twenty-seventh heaven.