Chapter 918 — Being and Non-Being Beget Each Other, Yet All Ends in Void
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 5
Suddenly Yan Shaoqing understood: "Those fellow disciples of the same master have joined hands and set a great snare for me! A snare of interlocking rings... I need to learn something of the Jingping Reforms — secretly, just a little. I will not take part in the Jingping Reforms; I will only secretly learn..."
Once well away from the Great Prison, Shen Mu halted the Dragon Qilin and said with a smile: "Yan Shaoqing has not come after us. The jailbreak is settled. You may come out now. Yan Shaoqing is a clever man; he will use his divine power of consciousness to cover this up for us, and no one will know you have escaped."
Beneath his feet were three shadows; two of them squirmed, rose upright, and gradually became the Jingping Imperial Preceptor and Emperor Yanfeng.
Emperor Yanfeng breathed the air outside with greed, still scarcely able to believe it, and murmured: "I truly have come out alive. I thought I would die in there..."
The Jingping Imperial Preceptor bowed to Shen Mu: "Thank you, Senior Brother, for the rescue!"
Shen Mu hastily returned the courtesy, and said with a smile: "If you had not taught him the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primal Spirits, I would hardly have found the flaw in his art so smoothly and planted a demon seed in his Dao heart. To keep that Emperor Throne art, the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primal Spirits, abreast of the times, we spent no one knows how much manpower and wisdom studying its flaws."
The Jingping Imperial Preceptor said gravely: "But to hold him so utterly in check — that is not so easily done."
"With the Great Brahma Heaven King Buddha's Immeasurable Kalpa Scripture I entered his dreams, and in a very short time deduced countless possibilities and found the simplest way to check him. Then with the Dao of Youdu I planted a demon in his Dao heart; the demon flower bloomed there and plunged him into dreams and illusions."
Shen Mu said: "My divine power invaded his divine treasures from his Dao heart, and was planted within them; for him to leap free of the dreams and illusions I made for him is now all too difficult. Each time he forcibly breaks through an illusion, he in truth sinks deeper into the dream; and every time he breaks my divine power of consciousness, it only sinks him the deeper into the Immeasurable Kalpas, to undergo calamity after calamity."
Emperor Yanfeng and the Jingping Imperial Preceptor were lost in admiration.
The Immeasurable Kalpa Scripture was the Emperor Throne true scripture of the Great Brahma Heaven King Buddha; the Undying Consciousness was the Emperor Throne art of the Crimson Emperor; and planting a demon in the Dao heart was a method from the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Scripture of the Woodcutter Sage.
Shen Mu had fused these three arts and divine powers; catalyzed by the Jingping Reforms, they had trapped even so dreadful an existence as one at the Lingxiao realm — truly a skill beyond mortal reckoning.
The Jingping Imperial Preceptor's eyes flickered. "Yan Shaoqing may one day be a fellow traveler on our Dao," he said. "I have already pointed out a road to him. Now we shall see whether he comes to walk it."
"Though the two of you are free men now, you must not show your true faces; you will have to change your appearances," Shen Mu reminded them.
Emperor Yanfeng and the Jingping Imperial Preceptor nodded. They had cultivated the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primal Spirits and the Profound Scripture of Flawless Creation — the two supreme works of the arts of creation — and to change their faces, and even to alter the structure of their primordial spirits, was a simple matter for them.
Shen Mu took out a mirror and handed it to the Jingping Imperial Preceptor. "Within this mirror lies the fruit of the Heavenly Court's million years of research into the ancient gods," he said. "The Dao Ancestor gave it to me. It was with the knowledge in it that the Heavenly Court remade weapons such as Heaven Venerable Yu. Study it well."