Chapter 979 — Sanctimonious
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Shen Mu turned his head, and there was Lian Huahun striding toward him.
The woman must have followed the tracks he and Luo Wushuang had left to find this place; but the weather of the Golden Sand Desert shifted like wind over water, and the desert was full of strange things besides. She must have run foul of more than a few of them, for she had arrived days late at the last gathering place of the Creators.
"That's right.
" Shen Mu, with no pretense of modesty whatever, moved his gaze off Lian Huahun and fixed it on the Void Bridge, his face calm. "There is no one left in the Great Void who can threaten me — not Your Majesty, nor Lady Yuanmu either.
" The reason he had stopped studying her was that Lian Huahun somewhat resembled Her Majesty the Empress and Lady Yuanmu: a waist narrow enough for a single hand, breasts high and full, and a walk as light as a leopard's, the muscle of flank and hip showing every ounce of its power. He found her thoroughly alluring. "Can it be that Her Majesty the Empress knows my tastes?
" A chill went through Shen Mu.
"She has studied me deeply, and she comes at me through my weaknesses.
Yet how little I know of her. " He did not know that the Empress had taken Lian Huahun's form not to deal with him at all, but to rouse Heavenly Venerable Hao's love for his mother — and that it happened to answer to Shen Mu's idea of beauty was purest accident.
Shen Mu steadied his unruly heart and kept his eyes upon the Void Bridge.
There the Void Heavenly Venerable was indeed trapped; mighty beyond measure though she was, she stood in deadly peril at the far end of the bridge.
The Void Bridge broke and resumed, broke and resumed, the gaps growing longer toward the end. Had it been mere collapse and shattering of the void, that alone could not have trapped the Void Heavenly Venerable; but there the void contracted as well, and when the contraction reached its limit there came an explosion of unspeakable terror. This contracting and swelling was like the breathing of the void itself, yet in every breath universes were born beyond the bridge and destroyed, life and death flashing by like passing light, and the power of it was beyond all reckoning.
Even a being as near to invincible as the Void Heavenly Venerable could scarcely stir a step, caught in a peril where she could neither advance nor withdraw. One after another her heavenly palaces tottered, riddled through and through by the doomsday spectacle of the Void Bridge, until her cultivation was a shadow of what it had been.
"Her heavenly palaces were opened up in truth, not conjured by visualization.
Had they been visualized, they would re-form the moment they were shattered, and she might even have had a chance of reaching the Other Shore of the Great Void.
" Shen Mu withdrew his gaze and thought, "The Void Heavenly Venerable knows nothing of the art of visualization; which means she may not be the Creator hidden in the Heavenly Court after all. " That a Creator lay hidden in the Heavenly Court was one of Shen Mu's conjectures.
There were altogether too many doubtful points about the death of the Cloud Heavenly Venerable — murdered by a Creator and laid under a Great Bloodline Curse; and when Shen Mu broke that curse for Yun Jianli, he had even encountered that Creator's divine consciousness. He had once guessed this Creator to be the Grand Emperor.
The Grand Emperor had died in the Great Void; but for a Creator, the death of body and soul is not true death — only the extinction of the divine consciousness is true death.
Whether the Grand Emperor had put on a new face and lived on in the Heavenly Court, there was no way of knowing. From the Void Heavenly Venerable's conduct on the bridge, however, she was most likely not the Grand Emperor; had she been, she could have drawn on his formidable divine consciousness to carry her across.