Chapter 1008 — The Sword Realm of Thirty-Three Heavens
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
The instant Shen Mu's pupils began to contract, the sword in his hand had already thrust forth—and with that thrust, the sword form transformed into the Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword!
It was a sword path born of beholding all the inequity under heaven, of watching gods and demons run riot and wreak ruin upon the mortal world, of grieving that countless beings languished in suffering, unable to lay hold of their own fates!
To pacify heaven—to pacify the injustices of the world, to pacify the inequities of the world, to hew down the evil and the treacherous, to butcher fiends and phantoms, and to set right what is wrong.
Kaihuang had never imagined that Shen Mu's opening move would turn out to be his very own first move upon the path of the sword.
When he had entered the Dao through the sword, the aftershocks of the Supreme Sovereign Calamity had not yet settled, and the Kaihuang Era had not yet come. He was still a young man then—a callow, impulsive lad, brimming with the gallantry of a wandering knight, roaming sword in hand through a world where demons and monsters ran amok.
He witnessed the Primal World warped and sealed by a power of overwhelming majesty; heaven after heaven vanished into silence, until nothing was left of the Primal World but a patch of land.
Though the Primal World of that age was many times vaster than the Jingping and Huangxu that came later, it was still far too small compared to the true Primal World.
To fold the Primal World, to seal the Primal World—what sort of majestic, torrential power was that?
He saw the legacy of the Supreme Sovereign—the towering, mountainous ruins of the Supreme Sovereign's heavenly court: collapsed halls, palace walls, the bones of gods and demons entombed beneath the foundations.
He would often sit amid those ruins, brooding over the history buried beneath them.
He also saw the people weeping and wailing amid war and suffering—husbands and wives, women and children, the aged and the infirm.
He saw gods and demons striding rampant and unbridled; he saw fiends and monsters exploiting the chaos to stir up evil; he saw the divine ones driving the surviving subjects of the Supreme Sovereign to raise grand altars, and herding those people up onto the altar blocks to be offered to the gods of the heavenly court. And he could still remember with perfect clarity the hideous, fawning, ingratiating smiles on the faces of those gods and demons as they sacrificed the people to the gods above.
The Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword was born from all this.
With chivalrous fire in his heart, he drew his sword to bring peace to the rivers and lakes.
It was his earliest technique; when he forged this sword path he had not yet met Shen Mu, had not yet crossed over to the early Longhan years.
The form was not as complete as his later sword-path techniques—one could even say it was somewhat crude—and yet, of the thirty-three heavens of his sword path, this was the move most replete with aspiration, the most heroic and sky-piercing of them all, without a single exception!
When the Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword blazed out from under Shen Mu's hand—the free-wheeling gallantry of a blade-wielding knight, the answer of violence to violence, the sword path of a boy hero bursting forth from one blade's edge—Kaihuang was in that single instant jolted back to the memories of those years, and unknowingly the Worry-Free Sword in his own hand seemed to carry him back to the past. What he now threw forth was the Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword as well, the same sword art as Shen Mu's; and as he performed it, he felt the wind screaming again, felt his body pitching within that wind.