Chapter 163 — The Waters of Bangong Lake
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 4 of 4
By then Shen Mu was already far along the road with Xuehu'er, drawing nearer and nearer to Yongzhou.
Everywhere along the way was the chaos of war. From time to time a sect would proclaim the emperor benighted — that he had wrongly raised a treacherous minister to be the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping and plunged the realm into ruin — and would rise in rebellion, vowing to purge the court and set the record straight. He came to Luodu, hard by Yongzhou. Luodu too was up in arms, its people in misery; armies from every quarter marched to put down the unrest, but it was like ladling out soup to still a boiling pot — of little avail.
The fire the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping had kindled burned too hot. Many of the officials who made up the ranks of Jingping's government at every level were masters drawn from the various sects, and now that those sects had rebelled, those officials rebelled with them.
The foundations of the empire had been shaken; the upheaval would be very hard to quell. "What means does the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping have, that he can still pacify a realm in such turmoil? " Shen Mu wondered uneasily.
"If this goes on, every sect under heaven will have risen.
Even if Jingping then puts down the rebellion, it will be left gravely weakened. " That was the one thing the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping could not afford to see.
If Jingping were gravely weakened, how would he subdue the other nations round about it, how would he seize the Ruins and build achievements unmatched in the ages?
Within Luodu's borders, though Shen Mu was nothing more than a traveler passing through, he was set upon by more than a dozen bands of bandits along the way — some restless divine-power practitioners, others officials of Luodu who had taken to the greenwood and made themselves kings of the mountains. Relying on his speed, and on the Lame Elder's Heaven-Stealing Leg Art whenever he could not win, he came through the whole road unscathed.
"If the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping can put down this rebellion — root out or bring to heel every hostile power in the empire — then Jingping, united in heart from top to bottom, will be a terror indeed! "