Chapter 1374 — Bearing the Boundless Void
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
In the palace, Yue the Heavenly Venerable and Shen Mu exchanged what each had gained in cultivation, and Shen Mu, holding nothing back, passed on to her all that he had comprehended of the various daos. From the great arts of calculation to the small, from the brands of the Ancient Gods' Great Dao to the dao of creation, from the Celestial River divine treasury to the Five Supremes of the Ancestral Court — and the cosmic arrangement of the Primal Embryo divine treasury, his views upon domains, his understanding of the dao-realm system — Shen Mu withheld nothing.
The Shanghuang era might be called the age in which the divine-treasury heavenly-palace system reached its culmination, and Yue the Heavenly Venerable, as the leader of that age, naturally possessed extraordinary insights of her own. The two of them hid in the peach grove to converse, and felt that the time was all too brief.
Shen Mu and Yue the Heavenly Venerable entered dreams together, stretching out time within the dreamscapes; in dream after dream they talked, and both felt deeply fulfilled. Before they knew it, several more months had passed.
The great situation of the Yuan World was one of peace, disturbed only by small-scale unrest. The races of the heavens and the myriad worlds were far too many, the powers of every quarter a motley mix.
The ten Heavenly Venerables of the Heavenly Court each sent trusted followers from beneath their banners to carve out spheres of influence, and between them were small conflicts and probings.
The great races of the heavens, too, seized upon the chaos to choose their stances, backing different Heavenly Venerables and powers. Wars of heaven against heaven gradually multiplied, and grew greater in scale.
Shen Mu and Yue the Heavenly Venerable hid away in their little tower, a world unto themselves, deaf and blind to the upheavals beyond.
The path Yue the Heavenly Venerable walked was likewise that of the divine-treasury heavenly-palace system. What she drew upon were the many different throne-arts of the Shanghuang and Longhan eras, and she too meant to walk the road of cultivating a Heavenly Court. In the Shanghuang era there had been fifteen South Shanghuang Heavenly Emperors, many of them her disciples and Ling the Heavenly Venerable's; she gathered the strengths of many houses and cultivated her own Heavenly Court, and by now had achieved something extraordinary.
It was only that she had not entered the Heavenly Court, and so could not match the ten Heavenly Venerables of the Heavenly Court in the depth of their accumulation in the throne-arts. These exchanges with Shen Mu were meant to make good what she lacked.
Yet to originate her own great Heavenly Court art by gathering the strengths of the various throne-arts would still require time, and her own pondering and tempering.
Her art was called the Zaiji Xukong Scripture. It was called Zaiji Xukong because zai, ji, and xukong are all numerals: Zaiji is a number of the greatest magnitude, zai being ten to the forty-fourth power and ji ten to the forty-eighth, while xukong is a number of the smallest magnitude, eighteen places behind the zero.
Yue the Heavenly Venerable's art was named Zaiji Xukong, and what it speaks of is the greatness and the smallness of space: at its greatest it can cross in a single step the Zaiji distances of the heavens and the myriad worlds; at its smallest it can become motes of dust and particles, even an indivisible void, and hide its traces within. All her attainments were founded upon the Zaiji Xukong Scripture.
With the Void Heavenly Palace at its center and different heavenly palaces raised all around it, she had formed a heavenly-palace system of her own.
Shen Mu studied her Zaiji Xukong, seeking to fathom the mysteries of the dao of space, and found that it revealed many curious things to him.