Chapter 1403 — The Prison Locks the Heart, the Dao Endures Forever
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
The cultivation strength Shen Mu could bring to bear grew steadily greater, and the pace of his walking grew steadily faster; bit by bit, the mysteries of the realm called the Nine Prisons Platform were opened up by him.
Within his heavenly palaces, the Nine Prisons Platform too gradually surfaced; drawing on his own understanding of how the Nine Prisons Platform imprisoned the dao heart, he was re-architecting the heavenly prison of his heavenly court, turning that heavenly prison into a realm.
With his own intelligence and talent alone, he could never have opened up every mystery of such a realm; it would still take the efforts of other gods, and of countless people in generations to come, before this realm could ripen into maturity. For now, however, he could at least fix this realm in place.
And since he himself had passed bodily through the Nine Prisons Platform and personally undone its seals, he stood above gods of the future beyond counting.
The Nine Prisons Platform was simply too perilous, far too perilous; few indeed could enter it and gather their dao heart anew without dying.
The road ahead, then, was this: Shen Mu would develop the realm and pass on the way to open the Nine Prisons Platform, so that the world might open that realm for itself. Essentially, all gods would go on developing the mysteries of the Nine Prisons Platform upon the foundation he laid, and so their comprehension could never be as exquisite as entering the Platform directly.
Of course, if one had the strength to enter the true Nine Prisons Platform, one could comprehend it as he had and temper oneself thereby, and one's attainments would not fall below his.
But those who could reach that step were few and far between; even among the Ten Heavenly Venerates, those able to step into the Nine Prisons Platform and win its mysteries surely numbered fewer than five.
More likely, the Nine Prisons Platform could not hold the Ten Heavenly Venerates at all: they entered, and then left, and gained nothing.
The demands the Nine Prisons Platform made upon the dao heart were simply too high; at the slightest misstep, one might well sink forever in that prison.
To walk out of the Nine Prisons Platform alive required extraordinary attainment in the cultivation of the Dao Realm, and at the very least the twenty-fourth heaven of the Dao Realm!
Yet even the twenty-fourth heaven of the Dao Realm was no guarantee one would walk out alive; Shen Mu had walked out because of the fortune that was his, and others might well not share such fortune.
The gods of the present all belonged to the divine-treasury heavenly-palace system; gods and demons cared only for power, their attainment in the Dao Realm was shallow, and so for them to fall into that prison was death and nothing else.
As time passed, Shen Mu undid more and more seals; within his primal-embryo divine treasury, the Ancestral Court had wholly regained its vitality, the great Dao flourishing.
The nineteen heavenly palaces each recovered as well, and one primordial spirit after another stood tall within them, vast in divine power.
And the divine treasuries — Xuandu, Youdu, Yuandu, and all the myriad heavens and worlds — were being unsealed one after another.
Shen Mu's cultivation grew purer and purer, the working of his dao heart ever more lucid and radiant.
He sank into a wondrous state: the dao mysteries of the Nine Prisons Platform became dao sounds and dao resonances, and as his vital essence and his great Dao broke seal after seal, those sounds and resonances became strange dao patterns that knit themselves into the heavenly-prison Nine Prisons Platform within each of his heavenly palaces.