Chapter 1791 — The Palace Master's Compensation
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
To Shen Mu, those six months had been sheer torment — and at the same time a rare chance to raise himself.
The Old Man Wuya knew far too many Dao arts and divine powers: the arts of the Miluo Palace, a portion of the arts of Tiandu, all of them he commanded down to the last detail; the only things he did not know were the great Dao arts he had slandered as the blasphemies of Tiandu, and the Way of Guixu. He could not use the Dao Tree trap to spy out the Dao arts and divine powers of those who had achieved the Dao without cultivating a Dao Tree.
Even so, the knowledge he possessed was enough to make him the foremost man of seventeen cosmic eras.
To cross blades with such a being, Shen Mu was naturally hard-pressed beyond measure; but fortunately, the Red Rope Knot Seal, which the master of the Miluo Palace had created expressly to restrain the Way of Guixu, was something Shen Mu also understood.
When the Old Man Wuya used the Red Rope Knot Seal against him, he unraveled it again and again, rendering that supreme divine power, aimed squarely at the Way of Guixu, utterly useless. In the end, to deal with him, the Old Man Wuya had no choice but to bring out the World Tree, adopting a strategy of trading a thousand of the enemy's for eight hundred of his own, each countering the other's Way of Guixu, in an attempt to grind away Shen Mu's Guixu Lotus.
But Shen Mu had the Long River of Chaos at his back; the Guixu Lotus was rooted in chaos, drawing energy without cease, and this became the capital that let him hold on.
Had he not had the Long River of Chaos behind him, a man of Shen Mu's strength would long since have been defeated and broken by the Old Man Wuya. The Old Man Wuya did indeed have a way to make the Long River of Chaos vanish, but if he did so, Shen Mu could immediately withdraw beyond the World Tree's shroud, and then the Old Man Wuya would have no way to cast him back into the past.
The two of them deadlocked for half a year.
Under the Old Man Wuya's oppression, Shen Mu's comprehension of the Way of Guixu grew stronger and deeper.
His understanding of the Way of Guixu had from the first been second only to Her Majesty the Empress; though he had never achieved the Dao through Guixu as she had, he had received the "patronage" of the Second Young Master Wuji, planted the lotus seed, and grown lotus leaves and lotus flowers, so that the power the Way of Guixu could bring forth actually surpassed the Empress's by a measure. Now his lotus flower had become a platform — a second-grade lotus platform of the Dao realm — and in his comprehension of the Way of Guixu he had long since surpassed the Empress by a great deal; one might say that since the beginning of the seventeen cosmic eras, he was second only to the Second Young Master.
Tempered by the Old Man Wuya, his comprehension deepened ever further, and he drew ever nearer to a third-grade lotus platform of the Dao realm.
Yet what improved the most was not the Way of Guixu but Shen Mu's World Tree.
The World Tree and the Guixu Lotus restrained each other; when the Old Man Wuya drove the World Tree to refine Shen Mu's Guixu Lotus, he was bound to bring forth every kind of mystery and marvel of the World Tree. And Shen Mu likewise cultivated the World Tree. His World Tree was a true World Tree as well — not born of visualization, nor parsed out through Dao arts by Lan Yutian Xushenghua, but come from the Old Man Wuya's "patronage.
" Shen Mu's use of the World Tree had always been half-understood; after all, he had simply planted it, with little personal insight into it. The Old Man Wuya's attempt to refine him was, in effect, a demonstration by example, teaching by word and deed, guiding his hand to show him how to drive the World Tree, how to comprehend the Dao arts hidden within it — which naturally brought him a qualitative leap.
This too was one of the reasons Shen Mu could hold out for half a year in the Old Man Wuya's grasp.