Chapter 232 — The Old Man's Clay Jar

"It hurts.

.

. it hurts so much!

" Shen Mu came down to the ground, every limb and bone in his body wracked with agony, the pain so sharp he kept drawing hissing breaths through his teeth. The monk's Vajra Unconquerable Art had made his body so hard that even the Yuan Soldiers could scarcely wound him, and all manner of divine arts were nearly useless against him, so that Shen Mu had fought him with the greatest difficulty. Halfwit Monk's attacks too had been terrifying in their force, tearing open Shen Mu's flesh and skin; the nine golden rings in particular had nearly smashed his skull to pieces.

Luckily the monk's methods of attack were fairly simple, and in the end he had still died by Shen Mu's hand.

"A divine arts practitioner of the Six Harmonies realm is still quite formidable. He can't be underestimated.

" Shen Mu rubbed the lump on his forehead, hissing cold breath through his teeth, and set the Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art to work, quickening blood and qi lest blood congeal into bruises. Two of the ribs in his chest had also been broken, and his back was a gory mess, the wound left when Halfwit Monk had pressed down on him with a Sumeru Seal.

The Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art was excellent for healing wounds, but it still could not compare with efficacious elixirs; fortunately these injuries were not enough to kill him. "For now I had best go back to the village first, and once my wounds are healed, go look for the Xuanliao Demon Ape.

" Shen Mu set his broken ribs for himself, left the monk's corpse where it lay — in the Barren Ruins there was no rule that corpses must be buried, and a corpse would soon be eaten by wild beasts drawn by the smell of blood, leaving at most bones behind.

If luck was bad, not even the bones would remain. He returned to the village, gathered several kinds of spirit herbs from the herb plot outside it, refined two batches of spirit pills, one for external wounds and one for internal, then asked the Dragon Qilin for a little dragon saliva to mix the medicine with. Seeing him beaten to such a state, the Dragon Qilin looked astonished, but asked no questions.

This Dragon Qilin, just as in the Imperial Academy, sat squatting at the village entrance guarding the gate, motionless.

Shen Mu reckoned that this fellow was a gatekeeper in name only, and in truth was simply lazy — too lazy to move. The Dutian Demon King still stood there stiffly; the Dragon Qilin was too lazy to move, while he had been fixed in place by the Deaf Elder and could not move at all. Shen Mu rested and nursed his wounds in peace.

When night came, the Deaf Elder still had not returned, nor had anyone else in the village returned.

By the next day, the village head and the others still had not come back. Shen Mu's lungs and viscera still pained him, and he could not draw deep breaths, but the ribs and the wound on his back had already healed.

"If I want the injury to my lungs and viscera to heal faster, the best way is to steam it, to let the medicinal vapor enter them. But there is no one to tend the fire for me.

.

. " The youth set the Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art to work, walking slowly about, breathing in and out gradually, so that the hidden injury in his lungs would heal the faster.

Suddenly a question came to him, and he thought: "Now that the New Year has passed, am I fifteen or sixteen? " The people of the village had always argued over his age; the village head and Granny had quarreled about it several times, and none could say for certain.

Granny Zhu had found Shen Mu in the spring, a babe in swaddling clothes two or three months old. Granny Zhu held that Shen Mu had been born before the New Year, but the village head held that he had been born after it. If born before the New Year, Shen Mu was sixteen; if after, he was fifteen.

Every New Year they would wrangle over this matter, and this year, he supposed, they would wrangle again. Even as he was thinking this, Shen Mu suddenly heard a humming sound; he looked up and saw several golden insects flying in from the woods outside the village.

Shen Mu blinked, and the golden insects suddenly hummed away and vanished into the woods. Then more insects came flying, circled the village once, and bored back into the woods.

"That woman from the Three Marvels Fortress has arrived!

" Shen Mu's eyes flickered.

The woman from the Three Marvels Fortress was far stronger than Halfwit Monk; she commanded a tide of insects, gu worms tempered until they were like steel and iron, able to gnaw even Yuan Soldiers down to nothing. The woman controlled thousands upon thousands of insects.

There were too many of them; if they came surging at once, Shen Mu would certainly be no match, and in an instant he would be eaten down to not a scrap left.

"Rather than let her kill her way into the village, I may as well settle with her outside it!

" Shen Mu looked all around, went to the apothecary's shop, and carefully lifted up a broken clay jar.

Inside it several scorpions were wrestling with their pincers and flinging their hooked tails forward, fighting over the spirit pills Shen Mu had fed them. Holding the broken clay jar, Shen Mu walked out of the village. The Dragon Qilin glanced at him and said in a muffled voice, "Cult Master, what are you going to do?

" "Fight! " Shen Mu said viciously.

"Fighting again.

. . " The Dragon Qilin was utterly uninterested.

"Don't come back all beaten and wounded again. " Carrying the jar, Shen Mu came to the riverside.

A few insects hung behind him the whole way, lurking in the grass and among the leaves.

Shen Mu stood still and waited a while, and saw more and more insects all around, spreading over the river's surface until the river seemed to be covered with a layer of gold.

These insects drew the great fish from the Yong River.

Several fish monsters leapt joyfully from beneath the water, wanting to eat the gu worms; but when the great fish two or three zhang long leapt into the air and opened their hideous jaws, they found the insects squealing and shrieking, each one growing to more than a zhang in length, pouncing onto the great fish and crunching away at them; soon those few great fish had been eaten down to nothing but fish-dragons that dropped back into the water. Shen Mu's eyelids twitched.

The fish monsters of the Yong River were no small matter either, comparable in strength to martial artists of the Spirit Embryo realm and the Five Luminaries realm, yet before the gu worms raised by the woman of the Three Marvels Fortress they were utterly helpless. "Cult Master of the Nether Demon.

" A voice came from beneath the river. Shen Mu looked toward it and saw the woman from the Three Marvels Fortress treading upon the golden insect tide, flying toward this side over the river's surface from downstream. She was not flying; the insects were — countless golden insects flying round and about her, and among them a golden queen insect much larger than the rest, upon whose back the woman stood. Shen Mu smiled sweetly. "What should I call you, sister of the Three Marvels Fortress?

" Qiu Yue halted the swarm a hundred and more zhang from Shen Mu, somewhat curious. "The Cult Master of the Nether Demon holds high station and great authority, supreme beneath all heaven. Why are you so courteous to an enemy, and call me sister?

" The Three Marvels Fortress had three marvels: insects, poison, and beautiful women.

This woman possessed a beauty that made the heart pound. At first sight of her, one would forget the scalp-numbing gu worms, and instead the heart would suddenly throb hard twice, as though struck deep in the soul by her beauty.

Shen Mu shook his head. "Once I came to the Barren Ruins, I was no longer the Cult Master of the Nether Demon Cult, but a child of the grown folk of my village. If you would lay down our grudge, sister, I would invite you into the village for the New Year.

Our New Year here in the Barren Ruins is quite lively.