Chapter 949 — The Hundred Methods of Slaying This Man
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"This is the twenty-sixth time Heavenly Venerable Hao has killed me.
" Shen Mu drank his tea in silence. The brew had steeped too long and gone thin. He set the cup down and stared blankly, lost in thought. "Twenty-six times, and not once has he used the same divine art to kill me. Remarkable. .
.
Since coming to the Heavenly Court I have been busy with this and that, and rarely have I had a moment's leisure.
I wonder what good teas there are to drink in the Heavenly Court? The Heavenly Court is where the powerful and the noble gather; their tea must surely be finer than anything in the lower realms.
" The notion took hold of him: he would buy some tea leaves and carry them down to the lower realms, a gift for his closest friends. And just then, within the illusion, Heavenly Venerable Hao killed him once more.
"Only, what is the currency of the Heavenly Court? With Jingping's Great Feng coins I could certainly buy nothing at all.
" Shen Mu could not help but miss Xue Hu'er and Si Yunxiang. If those two were here, would he ever fret over money? "Before long, Her Highness the Empress will build the Spirit-Energy Transfer Bridge, joining the Origin Realm to the Heavenly Court, and then I shall have money.
" He narrowed his eyes and rested his spirit.
"I have now died fifty-one times at Heavenly Venerable Hao's hands, and he has used fifty-one different divine arts, never once repeating himself.
Truly formidable. Who would have thought that so many flaws lay hidden in my own arts and techniques. " Admiration rose unbidden in his heart.
The onlooker sees the game most clearly, as the saying goes; a man can scarcely see his own weaknesses and flaws.
To a proud man like Shen Mu, his arts and divine powers already stood as perfect beyond compare, with not a single flaw to be found. Yet in another's eyes, many flaws might remain. Heavenly Venerable Hao was a Heavenly Venerable, after all—the second person in this world to open the divine treasury, second only to Heavenly Venerable Yu.
He had studied for so many years and created the Hundred Methods of Slaying Mu, which proved that at least a hundred flaws lurked in Shen Mu's arts.
To have so brilliant a man help perfect one's arts—what greater fortune could there be!
Every time, his first words were the same. "Heavenly Venerable Mu does not seem the least bit surprised. " Yet in Heavenly Venerable Hao's heart, astonishment and confusion only deepened.
The scene gave him a feeling of profound familiarity, a familiarity that grew with every moment, as though he had lived through it before—and not merely once!
Ever since he obtained the Grand Primordial Stone, Shen Mu's consciousness had grown stronger and stronger. Even before coming to the Heavenly Court his consciousness had been formidable: he could find the flaw in the consciousness arts of Zuo Shaobi and Yan Shaoqing, dragging Yan Shaoqing, the Heavenly Court's foremost master of consciousness, into a cycle of illusion from which he could not tell true from false. Now his consciousness was several times stronger than it had been then.
The Creator's Grand Subtlety Superior Consciousness, together with the Grand Primordial Stone and the Undying Consciousness of the Three Primordial Spirits, had driven his progress at a pace beyond imagining. And this time he was not relying on consciousness arts alone, but also employing the still-unripe art of Unchanging, turning the little pavilion into a space of Unchanging! Within that space of Unchanging, Heavenly Venerable Hao cycled round and round, without end!
Besides the space of Unchanging, Shen Mu also invoked the Immeasurable Kalpa Sutra of the Great Brahma Heaven King Buddha—not to enter a dream himself and become a world within a dream, but to plunge this Shen Mu clone of Heavenly Venerable Hao into a world of dreams. "The eighty-first time.