Chapter 1233 — The Bond Between True Men
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
"Where has Lan Yutian gone?
" Shen Mu asked. The last time he had gone to Jingping to escort Silent Craftsman, Blind Elder, and the others to the Ancestral Court, he had not seen Lan Yutian; the time before that, when he went to reforge the broken sword, he had not crossed paths with him either, and so a doubt had taken root in his heart.
"These days Lan Yutian is like a divine dragon of which one sees the head but never the tail—though far more likely he has simply lost his way and misplaced himself somewhere, who knows where. " Xu Shenghua said, "When I ran into him last, he was in the thick of being lost and happened to pass by my Shangcang Academy, which is the only reason I had the chance to sit and discourse on the Dao with him; I profited no little from it.
He said then that Grandpa Cripple and Celestial Venerable You could teach him nothing more, and that he meant to try walking a road of his own to break through the Pixiang Hall. " Shen Mu walked shoulder to shoulder with him as Xu Shenghua went on, "He wanders helter-skelter through all the great heavens, and he is a little simple into the bargain. Getting lost is the lesser matter—there are people hunting him as well.
But when I saw him last, I noticed Celestial Venerable You was guarding him from the shadows, so he should come to no great harm. " Shen Mu breathed a sigh of relief. The one who cared most for Lan Yutian, after all, was Celestial Venerable You; with him there, no great calamity would surely befall.
Of course, that was provided Lan Yutian did not cook up some great calamity of his own.
He felt a headache coming on.
Lan Yutian's soul was incomplete these days, and he always did things in a headstrong, scatterbrained way, here one moment and gone the next—no comfort to anyone. "Even if he blundered his way into the Celestial Heavens, I would not feel the least astonishment.
" Xu Shenghua said, "His road and yours reach the same summit by different slopes.
But you are not alike: you strive and struggle in the red dust of the mortal world, while his heart knows no distraction; he is more like one who walks the world after his own Dao heart, seeking to fathom the mysteries of the great Dao. Your realm I can still read; his realm I can no longer read at all. " A quiet loss stirred in him, for even could he read Shen Mu's realm, he could not imitate it. Shen Mu had already walked out a road unlike any other, a road no one could walk at his side.
The road Lan Yutian walked, meanwhile, stood for the road cultivators of the next tens of thousands of years—of hundreds of thousands, even millions—would one day have to tread; that road, too, was pitched too high for the many to join, but at least it had fellow travelers.
Xu Shenghua's own road, by contrast, was like a summing-up and a carrying-forward of the whole million years of cultivation from Dragon Han to this day.
He joined what came before to what came after, and his future achievements would be extraordinary. Shen Mu stayed at the Shangcang Divine Sect, and the two exchanged all that each had gained.
To trade thoughts with Xu Shenghua was a delight beyond most delights: both were geniuses rarely seen in the world today, deep in their foundations and extraordinary in their insight.
One was quicksilver by nature, his mind scattering in every direction; the other settled and steady, his designs close-woven—and they complemented each other to a marvel.
In all the time Shen Mu spent at his side, Xu Shenghua had no leisure even for wife and child; when Jing Yan and Xu Mengqing came looking for him, he sent them both home again.
Jing Yan even suspected that if mother and daughter were set on one side and Shen Mu on the other, and Xu Shenghua made to choose between the two, he would take Shen Mu without a heartbeat's hesitation and cast the two of them off. "With a friend of the Dao, what need has a man of a wife?
" she thought, sorely aggrieved.