Chapter 495 — The Broken Arm, the Blood Grudge

Silence settled over the chest once more, a stillness absolute; no sound could be heard, not even the sound of breathing.

Yet Shen Mu moved through that darkness with perfect ease, and without the faintest whisper of sound—until a single drop of sweat fell, struck a pool of blood, and made the softest of noises.

The owner of that drop of sweat shifted his feet at once, and then felt a sudden agony in his chest: his heart had been pierced through by a bamboo staff.

Shen Mu drew the staff out from behind him and moved on, silent and soundless; behind him came the sound of a body toppling.

That sound at once set off a violent upheaval. The many otherworldly demons all around struck out in turn, and a storm of divine abilities and blazing primordial weapons came crashing toward the place the sound had come from.

Amid the flare and fade of divine abilities and primordial weapons, Shen Mu flickered through the interior of the chest like a ghost, and one wielder of divine powers after another died at his hands. When the lights died and darkness returned utterly, the wielders stood swaying, then toppled dead to the ground.

Stillness returned once more.

The interior of the chest spanned a hundred zhang in every direction—by reckoning not small at all, a hundred and thirty or forty mu in area.

Several hundred people spread across such a space would by no means be crowded, even with a colossal creature like the Dragon Qilin among them. Yet to wielders of divine abilities such as these, the space seemed utterly cramped.

For them, a divine ability could arrive in the blink of an eye; a mighty enough art could sweep every corner of this place.

When Shen Mu had gathered them into the chest, panic had seized them all and they had instantly fallen to fighting, which was why the chest had shuddered and rocked so violently at first.

That had been the darkest, most chaotic hour of all: every man struck out in every direction to save his own skin, and no small number of the powerful died at the hands of their own side.

The chaos did not last long. A powerful being of the Heavenly Human realm spoke up at once, telling everyone not to panic.

That Heavenly Human realm expert was a clever one, but the next moment Shen Mu ran him through, and chaos broke out afresh. In the midst of it Shen Mu killed with staff in hand, and even those of the Heavenly Human realm could not escape death once he closed in.

When that bout of chaos subsided, someone tried to open the chest and let in the light—and was pierced dead by a single thrust of Shen Mu's staff.

In the interval they went through several more life-and-death struggles. Now every soul in the chest feared for his life: they suppressed the beating of their own hearts, held their breath, and even pressed their wounds shut, refusing to let blood flow, lest they draw Shen Mu's attention.

They even had to shut their eyes, for eyes would betray their position in the dark.

These wielders of divine abilities had mostly cultivated pupil arts, divine powers of the eye, and their eyes gave off light—making them without doubt Shen Mu's choicest targets.

Shen Mu was like a bat in the darkness, appearing and vanishing at will; any sound at all would rouse him and bring death.

In this suffocating darkness lurked a demon king ready at any moment to take their lives.

The chest opened and shut and spat out a few more corpses. In the instant it opened, light poured down from above, and everyone within felt a chill of dread. They shifted their positions one and all, not daring to stay where they were. After a brief spell of chaos came again the clash of divine abilities and the sound of bodies hitting the ground, and several more died in the confusion.

"I can't take this anymore!"

One of the otherworldly demons could at last bear that unbearable atmosphere no longer. His mind shattered, and he flung divine abilities and primordial weapons in every direction, shrieking, "Nobody come near me! Die! All of you, die!"

His divine abilities were mighty, and cut across the hundred-zhang space with ease; his primordial weapons too were terribly keen, sweeping in all directions and forcing those hidden in the dark to defend themselves.

A great chaos erupted in the chest. Battle cries rang everywhere, primordial weapons and divine abilities blasting wildly in every direction.

After a long while, the maddened wielder stopped, panting hoarsely. No sound remained around him but his own gasping.

"Dead?"

The madman froze for a moment, then, startled and delighted at once, roared with laughter: "You're all dead! All dead! I lived, I'm the only one left alive!"

Pff—

A bamboo staff thrust in through his mouth and out the back of his skull.

The chest opened; its four sides folded down and light spilled in. It was still the hundred-zhang space, but only Shen Mu, a pale-faced Ban Gongcuo, and the Dragon Qilin—crouched shivering in a corner—remained in it.

He had shrunk to a length of just over a zhang and hidden behind a cluster of racks. His hide was thick and his flesh tough, so he had come to little harm, but his body bristled with primordial weapons of every size; several of them were plainly Shen Mu's flying swords. Clearly no few attacks in the chaos had landed on him.

He was big by nature; strive as he might to shrink himself, he could not help taking a good many blows.

The ground was strewn with corpses lying every which way, each dead in a different fashion: some run through with the bamboo staff, some cloven through the skull with a blade, some hung up in paintings with their heads erased, along with a few oxen and sheep; some wielders of divine abilities were stuck as full of weapons as hedgehogs, and some had their bones and sinews crushed by the sword core, or their bodies ground to powder beneath the True Dragon Nest.

But more of them had died at the hands of their own.

The situation then had been too chaotic; to save themselves they had been forced to slaughter one another, and those who died by Shen Mu's hand—or Ban Gongcuo's, or the Dragon Qilin's—were the minority, three tenths at most.

Ban Gongcuo wiped the blood from his face, his heart still pounding with lingering fear.

In that gloom, Shen Mu had run into him more than once; had he not brought out the secret arts of the Golden Palace and been recognized by Shen Mu, he too would surely have been killed.

In the chaos he had taken many wounds and killed no few foes, but the most perilous moment of all was when Shen Mu got in close.

It had nearly cost him his life.

Ban Gongcuo had dodged Shen Mu's killing blow, but the staff had opened a bloody hole in his chest—by a hair's breadth he had kept it from his heart—and the Butcher Knife had nearly cut the artery at his throat; he had twisted his neck to a horrifying angle to escape that stroke.

After that, Shen Mu recognized his arts and struck at him no more, yet he could never shake the suspicion that Shen Mu had known him all along, and had merely wanted to seize the chance to kill him off along with the rest.

Of course he had no proof, and this was hardly the moment to bring it up.

Shen Mu was covered in blood, dragging the corpses out of the chest one by one with a limping gait. He too had taken many wounds; when the chaos broke out his own position had been desperately dangerous, and he had nearly died under the divine abilities and primordial weapons careening in from every direction.

Among them had been several experts of the Heavenly Human realm; their divine abilities were stronger still, and the attacks of their primal spirits were terrifying—a solid hit, and even with his True Dragon Overlord Body roused he would have died beyond question.

Even so, many divine abilities and primordial weapons had struck home; had that otherworldly demon not suddenly gone mad, he would hardly have been the one left smiling at the end.