Chapter 995 — Heroic Spirits of the Ancients (Second Update)
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
In the sky, the huge rhomboid eye slowly closed, leaving behind only a single slit running from north to south, like the eyelid of a sleeping beauty that twitched faintly from time to time. And the light spilling out from the Ancestral Spirit Realm was the very image of a beauty's eyelashes — save that these lashes were not black, but shot through with every color imaginable.
Had Shen Mu been here, he would have been utterly astounded.
Unfortunately, he was not here now; he had already entered the Ancestral Spirit Realm.
Shen Mu could hardly have described how he felt.
He stood in the palm of Langwan the God King, floating in the boundless radiance of thought, and those endlessly flickering thought-consciousnesses were like the light-wave signals of a brain.
As they threaded their way through them, from those brain-like thoughts they heard vast sounds, like the long cries of giant kun fish swimming at ease through the sea — their meaning unknowable — and they saw magnificent mountains and rivers hurtling backward past their eyes. Again he saw the starry sky, and the footprints of giants appearing amid the River of Stars, roaming through the cosmos.
He saw the birth of worlds great and small; so vast and entrancing were they before him that they spun and swallowed him whole. He saw one world after another destroyed, and that, too, possessed a beauty that shook the soul. These were the memories of the ancestral Creators; he and Langwan the God King were passing through the thought-consciousness of those Creators, glimpsing certain scenes from their memories.
He heard many magnificent voices — some whispered secrets in his mind, others seemed to fight upon a battlefield, with war drums rolling and the roar of slaughter shaking the heavens — and he heard strange and wonderful chanting, as though countless people had gathered in solemn ceremony to make sacrifice to something.
Within those voices, too, were insights into nature, cognitions of the world.
These, as well, were memories of the ancestral Creators; memory is not only pictures, but sound.
After a time, Langwan the God King brought Shen Mu to the center of the Ancestral Spirit Realm. There Shen Mu saw the ancient beings who had sacrificed themselves and fused with the Primordial Origin Stone to give birth to the Ancestral Spirit Realm.
They were towering figures, dim and indistinct, standing in crimson radiance like giants who bestrode heaven and earth. There were twenty-seven of them, and these twenty-seven Creators were the leaders who, bramble cart and ragged cloak, had guided the last of the Creator race across ten thousand perils to hew out the Other Shore World. Every race has its heroes who offer their wisdom and their lives for their people, and the Creators were no exception.
At the Creators' hour of greatest peril, a band of Creators worthy of songs and tears had arisen; they took the burden upon themselves of their own accord, gave their lives to battle Emperor Tai, and imprisoned him to his death within the Supreme Divine-Consciousness Domain.
After that, another band of heroes arose among the Creators, leading the surviving clansmen in flight from their pursuers, crossing the great desert to the very end of the Land of the Great Void.
It was they who built the Void Bridge there, wrought the wondrous Three Chambers, and led the last survivors to open up the Other Shore.
It was they, too, who, when their strength was exhausted and they knew death was unavoidable, fused themselves with the Primordial Origin Stone and transformed into the Ancestral Spirit Realm, so that even after death they might keep watch over their people.
Some were overflowing with natural genius, some of surpassing wisdom, some possessed of boundless battle power — and so they could devise so exquisite a Void Bridge and Three Chambers that even Xu the Heaven Lord and Huo the Heaven Lord would be trapped within.