Chapter 157 — The Golden Palace Drugged
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Shen Mu suddenly came to his senses: this line of thinking of his was perilous in the extreme. That was how the Lame Elder had lost his leg. Though the Lame Elder showed a smiling face to the world, behind their backs he sighed all day long, forever wanting to go and reclaim that leg of his, and never daring to.
If he himself sank into that frenzy of thieving that had possessed the Lame Elder before he was crippled, then his own end could not be far from the Lame Elder's. "Sweet as this feeling is, I had best do less of it from now on.
" Shen Mu cautioned himself, then turned and looked again at the treasures strewn across the floor.
Apart from the sinister artifacts forged by Loulan's Golden Palace, he wanted to carry them all away — only, what he could carry was limited. "The Sword Pill is enshrined here by them; it must be a treasure of no small worth.
" Shen Mu picked up the Sword Pill.
It was very heavy; he guessed that a great many swords were sealed within.
His vital qi probed into it a little, and with a hum a curved saber flew out of the "Sword Pill" and slowly revolved half a turn before him. "It is no Sword Pill — it is a Saber Pill!
" Shen Mu was astonished.
He had seen such Saber Pills before, among the rebels of the Man-Di Kingdom: they had been used to batter Libationer Bashan's Precipice Heaven-Steel divine power, and in the end tens of thousands of curved sabers had all embedded themselves in the Precipice Heaven-Steel and could not be recalled — which was why Torimu had been able to slaughter the rebels so cleanly and easily. Shen Mu seized one of the curved sabers; it did not sit well in his hand, and evidently a special cultivation method was needed to wield it. Even so, this saber's quality was far above the other rebels' sabers, its temper no inferior to his own Slaughter Blade. He withdrew his vital qi, and with a ding the curved saber returned into the Saber Pill and vanished.
The Saber Pill held an enormous number of curved sabers; it was certainly a weapon of mass slaughter. Shen Mu then picked up the broken sword. He could not sense its power; it seemed to possess none at all, and it lay light as a feather in his hand.
Shen Mu opened his Soaring-Heaven Sky Eye and his Azure-Heaven Sky Eye and examined it closely, yet could make nothing of it.
Still, if Loulan's Golden Palace had hidden it so reverently in their treasure vault, it must be extraordinary; so he put it away as well.
Part of the old zither was charred. Shen Mu glanced at it: the marks of a lightning strike.
"Eh? Something is wrong here — this zither carries a killing aura and a demonic aura! " Shen Mu examined it closely, and the more he looked the stranger it seemed.
The zither bore a blood-killing aura, as though rich blood flowed within it, and the demonic aura was thick beyond measure.
This zither was not like a zither at all; it was like a monstrous demon of unspeakable terror.
"Could it be that a tree spirit cultivated into a demon and was made into a zither by someone? A fine thing — that too must be carried off.
" Shen Mu slung the zither onto his back, then picked up a hand bone.
The instant it came into his grasp, he felt as though struck by lightning; his whole body shook violently, and a voice of incomparable resonance burst thunderously in his mind.
"The Divine Tongue! " Shen Mu's face changed drastically and he flung the hand bone down at once. That voice was the Divine Tongue; holding it in his hand, he had felt as though a deity had appeared in his mind.
He had just plucked this hand bone out of the golden altar's seal and tossed it aside without a thought; only now did he realize how right he had been to throw it away.
"This hand bone is profoundly strange. Could it be the hand of a god? " He steadied himself, drew the Chubao Sword, and used it to flip the hand bone up. Then he picked a cloth bag off the floor and put the hand bone into it.