Chapter 307 — A Trap Laid in Secret

"Something is watching me!"

Shen Mu's heart lurched. He had not seen the two eyes hidden in the dark, yet he could feel that gaze.

He turned around and did not enter the bridge; instead he closed his eyes and paced slowly outside it, his steps neither hurried nor slow. Though his eyes were shut, he traced out a circle -- a perfect circle.

When the circle was complete, Shen Mu halted. He had walked it in order to calculate, from the pull of that gaze, the exact direction it came from -- a feat that drew on the spatial calculation techniques of the divinatory arts.

To anyone watching, he was merely pacing and brooding over some knotty problem; no one would have guessed he was pinpointing the position of a spy. True skill shows itself in the smallest details, and in this Shen Mu was already flawless.

Suddenly his mind and spirit shook. In those few steps he had calculated the source of the gaze -- even the distance between the two eyes!

What fixed on him was a single pair of eyes, and the space between them was two hundred and sixty-four zhang!

In other words, the dreadful being watching him from the dark had eyes more than two hundred and sixty zhang apart!

What a colossal existence!

"Could it be the creature of the Nether Capital that I frightened off with a phrase in its own tongue when I came aboard? Or is there something else lurking nearby?"

Shen Mu steadied himself, his face unchanged, betraying not the least alarm, and turned to walk toward the bridge.

He had already made up his mind: first explore the bridge, and if anything went wrong, leave at once -- not a moment's lingering!

The bridge was a ship's control room; from it one could steer the treasure ship's course and route, direct its battles, evade attacks. It was the heart of the vessel.

Once inside the bridge, once he found the geographic route map, he could steer the ship by that map.

Shen Mu's heart burned. This ship carried his dream of returning to the Land of No Sorrow.

He had barely stepped onto the bridge when a door suddenly opened and a Great Shaman blundered in, muddled and uncomprehending.

The two men saw each other and both started. The Great Shaman was a veteran of a hundred battles; he recovered in an instant, and without a word of parley he flipped open the gourd at his back. Countless wandering souls poured out and hurled themselves at Shen Mu!

At the same time golden light blazed from the Great Shaman's whole body as he roused the Shaman Sovereign's Louluo Sutra of the Golden Palace of Loulan. His flesh swelled and he became a one-eyed, four-armed giant.

His eye grew at the center of his face; his mouth, squeezed tiny by the eye, sat at the very bottom of his left cheek; his nose grew beneath his right cheek. He gripped vajra maces, and at a shake in the wind the segmented vajra shafts of the four maces spun with a shriek, like four slender pagodas, and came howling down at Shen Mu!

"A disciple of the Shaman Sovereign?"

At a glance Shen Mu recognized the Shaman Sovereign's Louluo Sutra. This man's cultivation was exceedingly deep, and the wandering souls spewing from the gourd at his back were a means of attacking the soul.

Great Shamans refined the souls of others into wandering souls, and every wandering soul was formidable. A wandering soul burrowed into a victim's body and gnawed at his soul; even an adept of the Six Harmonies realm could hardly withstand it.

If dozens of wandering souls came at once and invaded the body, an adept of the Six Harmonies realm would have no room to resist at all!

The greatest use of the soul gourd was on the battlefield: countless wandering souls darting this way and that, invading bodies, devouring the souls of the enemy host and leaving swaths of corpses behind -- invincible, and terrifying in its power!

The most dreadful thing on the battlefield before Qingmen Pass was not the blades of the Man-Di Kingdom's soldiers but the Great Shamans of the Golden Palace of Loulan. Their methods of attack were truly uncanny, and hard to guard against.

The countless wandering souls flew from the gourd, wailing like ghosts and howling like demons, and rushed at Shen Mu. Behind Shen Mu the Heaven-Bearing Gate suddenly gaped open; a cold wind shrieked, and with a single swish it swept every wandering soul away!

Any soul of the dead can scarcely escape the dominion of the Nether Capital. The Golden Palace of Loulan had secret arts to hold souls back and to cultivate with the souls of others, and in the way of souls it stood at a height other holy lands and sects could not reach -- but before the Heaven-Bearing Gate it had met its nemesis!

The Heaven-Bearing Gate swallowed all the wandering souls and slammed shut; at once the ghastly wailing in the bridge fell silent.

The Great Shaman was shaken. The gourd at his back dropped with a crack and shattered into pieces. His four arms whirled up and down, and the vajra maces in his hands became four vajra pagodas, their force a thousand jun, crashing down at Shen Mu.

Shen Mu did not meet them head-on. He flashed backward, and the No Sorrow Sword flew from its sheath at his back. The Great Shaman sneered; a beam of light shone from the vajra pagodas and fixed the No Sorrow Sword, drawing the blade into the pagoda.

His four vajra maces looked like maces, but in truth his primal weapon was four pagodas refined to shrink and grow at will, reduced to the utmost until they resembled maces that he could hold in his hand day to day.

In battle, though, he could crush an enemy with the pagodas' dreadful power, smashing him to pulp with one invincible blow!

The pagodas were also a strange treasure that could take in an opponent's primal weapon. If one were the least bit careless and one's primal weapon was drawn into the pagoda, then as one side waned the other waxed; stripped of his primal weapon, the opponent had only death before him!

He had just taken Shen Mu's No Sorrow Sword into the pagoda when suddenly sword after sword flew from behind Shen Mu, and with a ringing clang-clang-clang they planted themselves in that pagoda.

He stared blankly. Before he could react, a flood of sword light surged into his face and drowned him, and in an instant the pagoda was bristling with swords on every side!

The Great Shaman's arms gave way first. For all that he had become a one-eyed giant of immense strength, he could not bear up such a mass of solid weight; his arm bones snapped with a crack.

Swish, swish, swish -- thousands upon thousands of swords planted themselves in perfect order around the pagoda, forming a sword core of inconceivable size, several zhang across, and the Great Shaman was nowhere to be seen.

Shen Mu walked on toward the helm on the bridge, and beneath that vast sword core the Great Shaman lay impaled within it, one foot still sticking out from the swords.

Shen Mu came to the helm. This treasure ship's helm differed from the helm of the Jingping Kingdom's tower ships, chiefly in its construction. A Jingping tower ship had only one helm, used to change direction of advance and to rise or descend; this treasure ship had, besides the helm, other strange and curious components, and beside them lay a silver helmet with a red tassel.

Shen Mu frowned and looked around. He could not understand what these components did. He hesitated, then picked up the silver tasseled helmet and put it on his head.

Hummm --

Suddenly his eyes blazed with light. A vast space swelled and unfolded before him at furious speed; in an instant heaven and earth were transformed, and there appeared before him the Desolate Ruins and the boundless geographies of Jingping, the grasslands, and the ice and snow of the north!

Shen Mu was dumbstruck. "Whoever forged this ship was a craftsman beyond nature's art, to hide the geography within a skull and use a helmet to steer the treasure ship's course!"