Chapter 1012 — The Mischievous Youth Shames One and All
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"Sword Twenty really is formidable.
" Shujun set Shen Mu down from his back. Shen Mu stretched his limbs and was soon bouncing about again, which made Shujun click his tongue in wonder.
Earlier, Shen Mu's injuries had been grave; Kaihuang's Sword Twenty had struck him down hard, so hard that Shujun had wondered whether his soul was about to return to the Ancestral Spirit Realm. The sword wounds on his body had been severe enough, but the worst of the damage was not to his flesh: his Primeval Fetus divine treasury and his Heavenly Palace had been injured, struck by the sword domain Kaihuang had fused into Sword Twenty.
What was strange was that, wounded so grievously, Shen Mu had healed so quickly that Shujun half suspected the boy had only been feigning the severity of his hurts. "Kaihuang is worthy of his name as the foremost man of the sword Dao. His understanding of the sword truly runs deeper than other men's; the Sword Twenty he created is even more formidable than Sword Nineteen, Tijie.
" Shen Mu took out his sword core and traced it back and forth through the air, trying to reproduce Sword Twenty. Sword Twenty differed from all nineteen of the foundational sword techniques that came before it.
When he had first comprehended Sword Eighteen, Shen Mu had felt something: that the further the foundational sword techniques went, the more mana they consumed, until at last they would become a kind of sword art almost impossible to accept, one that might drain every drop of his mana in a single use. His Sword Eighteen already showed signs of this.
His cultivation was deep, stronger than that of his peers; even Kaihuang, famed for his majestic, mighty power, was far inferior to him at the same realm.
So wielding Sword Eighteen had never felt taxing to him.
But for anyone else it would be more than merely taxing. To combine Sword Eighteen into a complete sword art and execute it would, in all likelihood, exhaust a Divine Ability practitioner's cultivation entirely. Sword Nineteen, the Tijie Sword, demanded an even more terrifying expenditure of mana, and not mana alone. It required profound mastery of divination and array formations, even of space itself, and set the highest demands upon the state of one's mind.
Sword Nineteen was equally exacting in its demands upon one's mastery of the sword; to learn this single move was to enter the Dao through the sword outright.
And in all the world, those who had learned it were very few. Even for those who had, the mana it consumed was likely more than an ordinary Divine Ability practitioner could bear. In this all-out clash with Kaihuang, Shen Mu had sensed that Sword Twenty's requirements were higher still, almost perverse, one might say.
"To use this sword, it seems you pour your soul into the blade and burn your blood and qi; it can only be executed in concert with a sword domain. " Shen Mu frowned deeply. There was no hope of his wielding Sword Twenty any time soon; as yet he could not comprehend a sword domain of his own.
His Tribulation-Answering Sword was no foundational technique but a move for severing divine treasuries and Heavenly Palaces, a sword Dao created to shatter the old order, originally meant to be turned upon himself. Back then, when Shen Mu had lost his soul and had nothing left but consciousness, he had used the Tribulation-Answering Sword to cut himself down. First he destroyed his own Heavenly Palace; the blade light, carrying the surging momentum of that collapsing palace, severed the divine bridge and shattered the divine treasury of Heaven-Man, the Five Luminaries, the Six Harmonies, and Life and Death, leaving only the spirit fetus.
Later, he found that using this move to sever the Heavenly Palaces and divine treasuries of other gods, demons, and Divine Ability practitioners worked rather well too. But this move was not a foundational sword technique.