Chapter 149 — The Mighty Martial Emperor
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
This ox's abilities could rival those of a Demon King; it trod upon water more steadily than upon dry land, and it was skilled at wielding wind and thunder, moving with extraordinary speed. At such a pace it could easily cover three thousand li in a single day.
Libationer Bashan gave a rough glance over the scrolls Shen Mu and Ling Yuxiu had chosen, and as he pinched the scrolls Shen Mu had handed in he felt something of a headache. The scrolls Ling Yuxiu had chosen were sword arts and divine abilities, or else spells; of what Shen Mu handed in, only the Falling Sun Sword Art could be called normal, and the other two scrolls truly stumped him. One of these two was called the Soul-Drawing Guide, and the other the Talisman Edict for Commanding Ghosts and Dispatching Spirits.
Any sword art, divine ability, or spell had its basic techniques to follow; by the principle of understanding a whole category from a single touch, of drawing one inference from three instances, Libationer Bashan, with his incomparably deep foundation, could instruct them in all of it.
Only these two scrolls Shen Mu had chosen were obscure among the obscure; in ordinary times, even when Libationer Bashan entered the Tianlu Tower, upon seeing such unfashionable spells he would always give them a single glance and set them aside, paying them no heed at all, and to ask him to expound upon them was truly to demand the impossible. To a being of his realm, the Soul-Drawing Guide and the Talisman Edict for Commanding Ghosts and Dispatching Spirits simply lacked power, and nothing about them brightened the eye; he genuinely could not tell what Shen Mu's purpose was in choosing these two spells.
Libationer Bashan sat on the ox's back, tossed the two scrolls back to Shen Mu for him to study on his own, and then explained to Ling Yuxiu the scroll she had brought out of the Tianlu Tower. Ling Yuxiu was a child of the imperial house, and so could enter the second storey of the Tianlu Tower; what she had brought out this time was a profound art of the Dao school called the Azure Empyrean Lightning Guide. By its name alone it was many times more orthodox than the Soul-Drawing Guide and the Talisman Edict for Commanding Ghosts and Dispatching Spirits that Shen Mu had dug up.
The orthodox lightning arts of the Dao school lived up to their name, and Libationer Bashan expounded them with perfect clarity; at the many hard-to-grasp points, once he gave his pointers, Ling Yuxiu understood them all at once. Shen Mu too listened, absorbed, when it suddenly occurred to him that the Azure Empyrean Lightning Guide might be set against his Eight Formulas of Thunderclap for mutual reference, and that perhaps an unexpected power might be won from it.
His thoughts spread outward, and whatever Libationer Bashan said after that he did not hear clearly, sunk as he was in his own calculations. Ling Yuxiu asked Libationer Bashan about a few points that still puzzled her, then at once set to testing it; she played out a string of spell formulas, and abruptly, from a clear sky, a thunderbolt cracked down upon the river with a crash, blasting several river fish a zhang long belly-up!
Ling Yuxiu was startled and delighted at once, thoroughly pleased with herself. Libationer Bashan shook his head and said, "Princess, your foundation is far too weak; you have not drilled your basics properly.
The power of the Azure Empyrean Lightning Guide is more than this.