Chapter 183 — Underworld Raid
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"Adept at playing at ghosts and spirits, are you?
Can you summon gods and ghosts to fight? " Shen Mu gave a slight start, and then suddenly recalled the Soul-Drawing Incantation and the Talisman Command over Ghosts and Gods — the two arts of the soul and of specters which he had found on the first floor of the Heaven Records Tower.
The Talisman Command over Ghosts and Gods belonged to the Hongshan School, while the Soul-Drawing Incantation came from the Netherworld Sect.
Both arts had been placed on the first floor of the tower because they formed a rather out-of-the-way category of the magical arts that very few ever cultivated; they were arts of the soul, yet they happened to possess barely any offensive power. Especially the Talisman Command over Ghosts and Gods — that art boasted that it could mobilize ghosts and dispatch gods, but Shen Mu had tried it several times; at most it was roughly on the level of the Five-Ghost Transport Art in the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Sutra, only considerably more convoluted.
After finding the two arts, Shen Mu had wanted Chancellor Bashan to instruct him, but Chancellor Bashan likewise considered them overly obscure, had never studied them, and thus tossed them to Shen Mu to comprehend on his own. Although the Talisman Command was on a par with the Five-Ghost Transport Art, its runes were plainly far more complex, and moreover it required the refinement of a talisman artifact.
That artifact was even more complex than the talisman artifact Shen Mu had seen in the Golden Palace of Loulan: it was an incomplete sphere with one thousand and twenty-four irregular facets, each facet bearing a complex rune. The talisman artifact in the Golden Palace of Loulan had only fourteen facets.
It was precisely because he saw how complex the Talisman Command was that Shen Mu took the art to be remarkably mighty; never had he imagined its effect would be only the equivalent of the Five-Ghost Transport Art. He suspected that the Hongshan School might have concealed something from the outside world, but that school had already disappeared from this world; it no longer existed.
As for the Soul-Drawing Incantation of the Netherworld Sect, Shen Mu had cultivated it; whether it could successfully draw the souls of the dead back from the underworld, he had never tried. Some runes in the two arts resembled one another — indeed, all soul-type arts should share some similarities.
Shen Mu bought some yellow paper and cinnabar in the city, spent two days refining the talisman artifact of the Talisman Command, and then spent another day writing out the runes of the Soul-Drawing Incantation as well, setting the two side by side for comparison.
After comparing them, Shen Mu was finally able to determine that both the Talisman Command and the Soul-Drawing Incantation in the Heaven Records Tower contained errors — certain runes had been deliberately written wrong. Unwilling to hand over their arts to the court in good faith, those sects had deliberately corrupted a few runes in the arts they handed in, so that the powers of the arts were either vastly weakened or never manifested at all.
The Talisman Command required an extremely large number of runes, and the errors in it numbered more than a dozen.
Yet precisely because the runes were so many, the correct ones likewise numbered over a thousand. This was a magnificent treasury of knowledge.
With such a foundation, Shen Mu could amend the erroneous runes in the Soul-Drawing Incantation.
The incantation called upon more than six hundred arrangements of runes; Shen Mu corrected every mistaken rune he could detect, and when he felt there ought to be no errors left, he immediately found a soldier and asked, "Are there still corpses in the city? I wish to test a spell.
" "Does Your Honor need Netherworld Sect corpses to test the spell? " asked the soldier.
"All the Netherworld Sect corpses have been buried. If they are needed, we will have to dig them up again.