Chapter 278 — The Rhythm of Attack and Defense

Though the two had not yet exchanged a blow, their wits had already crossed. Yet despite the reversal, Shen Mu relaxed not at all. Indeed, as Ban Gongcuo had said, Shen Mu had no time to consolidate the Six Harmonies realm.

The two had entered it at the same moment, but Ban Gongcuo was different: with the experience of twenty lives and twenty breakthroughs into the Six Harmonies realm, a single day sufficed for him to consolidate the realm and marshal every power it could command.

Shen Mu, by contrast, needed time to grow familiar, to grope and explore, before he could master that realm's strength.

Most crucial of all: he had no circulation diagram for the Six Harmonies realm.

The circulation diagram of the Profound Body Three Cinnabar Art carried cultivation only as far as the Five Luminaries realm; Shen Mu had obtained a stone slab in the Golden Palace of Loulan, but the art upon that slab should be a circulation diagram for the Seven Stars realm.

Without a Six Harmonies circulation diagram, forcing the practice would easily bring on the perilous state of the six directions inverted and heaven and earth thrown into disorder — if not death, then grave injury. Shen Mu sank his mind into the Spirit Treasury of the Six Realms. Within it he saw his own Primal Embryo, and beyond it the Five Luminaries and their star temples in the heavens, and he sensed his own Five Luminaries Star Lord.

From the vantage of the Primal Embryo one could see heaven and earth and the four quarters.

Clearly, once one entered the Six Harmonies realm, the three great spirit treasuries had to be coordinated into one; the art must run through all three and make of them a single whole.

With heaven, earth and the four quarters present in the Spirit Treasury of the Six Realms, dharma power swelled and could drive divine abilities — a qualitative leap; but the lack of a Six Harmonies circulation diagram for the Profound Body Three Cinnabar Art would be his greatest weakness. At last the two walked out of the capital and reached its outskirts.

Ban Gongcuo's movements grew wider and wider as he walked, stumbling and lurching, yet the variations of his stance and body art still seemed endless, preserving a flawless state with not one opening.

Shen Mu could not but admire him: from the city to the outskirts, Ban Gongcuo had shifted through dozens of body arts alone, each exquisitely refined, each cultivated to its ultimate limit.

When he advanced in dragon form, he truly seemed a true dragon walking the earth; when he took tiger strides, he gave the impression of a fierce tiger; when he used the phoenix-sparrow art, he was like a phoenix-sparrow skimming low; when he used the swimming-fish art, he was like a fish battling a swift current.

It was hard to imagine one man perfecting so many body arts at once.

The two walked farther and farther, and the killing aura thickened by degrees. From Shen Mu's Taotie Pouch the sword pellet flew out; the Chubao Sword too flew up from the pouch and hung at his waist.

Then the two Slaughtering Knives on his person came loose, driving one after the other into the ground until only their hilts showed, more than ten zhang apart. Next the bamboo staff planted itself in the earth, the iron hammer fell, and the brush, ink, paper and inkstone slid from his sleeve — all of it thrown down as he walked.

His body swayed as he walked; one by one the dark-iron blocks dropped from his chest and back, heavy and solid; the iron shoes on his feet burst apart, and the iron weights hung on his legs dropped away as well.

Lightened all over, his bones crackling and popping, his momentum rose yet again, the tide still climbing. Ban Gongcuo was still led along in his rhythm.

As Shen Mu's momentum climbed, the pressure on him grew greater, yet he held on still, not the slightest flaw showing.

In the distance the grass had already come up on the meadows, where many men and women were out walking, enjoying the spring in company.

Children flew kites, racing joyfully over the grass; some young men showed off their body arts, leaping into the air in a few steps and standing on a kite in mid-sky, drawing sighs of admiration from the girls below. Then the admiration gradually thinned, and the spring wanderers turned to look at Shen Mu and Ban Gongcuo, those two strange youths.

In the woods whole flocks of birds burst up with a clatter, fleeing far away; the killing aura streaming from the two youths frightened them.

Shen Mu and Ban Gongcuo came to the bank of the Tu River, and of a sudden countless great fish leaped from the water, splashing and thrashing across the surface, fleeing toward the middle of the river in tremendous commotion.

In that instant, as the fish leaped and the birds rose, a child suddenly squeezed his eyes shut and opened his mouth wide and began to wail.

And amid that wailing, by the river, Shen Mu and Ban Gongcuo struck almost in the same instant!