Chapter 510 — Teacher of Sages (Auspicious Year of the Dog!)

In Wenyuan Hall, Shen Mu looked around. The Young Grandmaster's Wenyuan Hall struck him as somewhat shabbier than the great halls of the other Cult Masters, no doubt because the Grandmaster had never been a Cult Master and so stood a cut below them in rank. In Shen Mu's eyes, however, it was precisely because the Young Grandmaster had never been Cult Master or Sage Teacher of the Dark Demon Sect that he could lay down that burden and accomplish what even the Cult Masters had never accomplished.

The Young Grandmaster had been half teacher and half friend to the Jingping Imperial Teacher; when the Imperial Teacher came to visit, he willingly let him read the Great Nurturing Dark Demon Sutra, told him the general tenets of the Way of the Sages of the Heavenly Sage Sect, and afterward wrote letters in his own hand recommending him to the Daoist Gate and the Great Thunderclap Temple. The Jingping Imperial Teacher owed his towering achievements to him in no small measure; the Imperial Teacher's later reform and transformation likewise owed him a great deal, and even the founding of the Grand Academy was deeply bound up with the Young Grandmaster—he had been the Grand Academy's first Grand Chancellor, and whenever the Imperial Teacher carried out reform, he would often come and ask the Grandmaster's advice.

The state of Jingping had three giants of the reform party: the Imperial Teacher and the Emperor were the two giants in the open, while the Young Grandmaster was the third giant hidden behind them. Judged by achievement alone, throughout the whole history of the Holy Sect, at most two or three of the successive Cult Masters could match what the Young Grandmaster had done. And yet, because he had never been a Cult Master, Fengdu never gave him a Cult Master's treatment—and Shen Mu felt the injustice keenly on his behalf.

"Ah, you still cannot change that soaring, swaggering temper of yours.

" The Young Grandmaster led him into the hall, while the Dragon-Qilin, all great bones and hard scales, rubbed itself against him around and around until his robes were worn through and his thighs chafed red. Pretending not to notice, he said to Shen Mu, "What are we to do now?

You have nearly fought your way through every successive Cult Master!

Do you take them for easy men? They are the bullies and tyrants of Fengdu!

When you die of old age, how will you find a footing in Fengdu. .

.

" "Grandmaster.

. .

" Shen Mu abruptly threw his arms around him, his voice trembling, and for a long while would not let go. "I missed you. " The great skeleton wanted to wipe his eyes, but he had no tears to wipe, and sobbed, "I did not know you had lain in wait at the Desolate Ruins to block the gods of High Heaven.

Only later did I hear it from Yunxiang; the Dharma-Protecting Elder brought back your ashes, and I could not arrive in time to see you one last time.

I have come to see you now!

I kept it hidden from Fat Dragon all along, not daring to tell him—but I cannot hide it any longer. " The Young Grandmaster was taken aback, then patted his back and said with deep feeling, "I have merely changed the way I live, that is all. Look—I have flesh and blood now. In my eyes, it is you who are dead.

Should I, too, burst into tears? Enough, enough—just now Cult Master Shen was thundering abuse at the ancestors and beating them black and blue; why put on the tender postures of a little child now. . . Enough, Dragon-Qilin!

You have rubbed my thigh bloody! Have you not had enough?

" The Dragon-Qilin tried to stretch out its tongue to lick the wound, and only then remembered it had no tongue; so, reluctant to part, it moved a little away from him. After a moment it could not help coming back for another rub. The Young Grandmaster was left utterly speechless.

He and the Dragon-Qilin had been long apart; at their reunion they had been very affectionate, and he had even had a good cry, but this fat dragon kept clinging and rubbing until it had truly annoyed him, and he wished he could banish the brute to the ends of the earth.

"On this visit I also meant to see the Woodcutter Sage who transmitted the scripture upon the stone, and the Founding Grandmaster, and the Three Sage Kings.

" Shen Mu asked, "Grandmaster, are they in Fengdu as well?

" "The Three Sage Kings you will never see—their souls are rent, their spirits scattered. " The Young Grandmaster looked somber. "They died in battle.

On the point of death they forced the scripture of the stone upon the next generation of Cult Masters, but could not preserve their own souls, and so could not enter Fengdu.

I had thought I would meet the Founding Grandmaster here as well, yet I have not seen him; and the Woodcutter Sage is not in this place either. " Shen Mu was stunned. If not Fengdu, where else could the Woodcutter Sage and the Founding Grandmaster have gone?

The Woodcutter's physical body had turned into a stone statue, standing in Little Jade Capital, still gazing toward the Desolate Ruins; his primordial spirit had left his body and gone elsewhere.

The Founding Grandmaster had founded the sect and set down its teachings, but had never set down accomplishments, never become a Sage; he should not have become a god either, so he could hardly have escaped an old man's death—where, then, had he gone? The Young Grandmaster hesitated for a moment, then said, "You have beaten the successive Cult Masters. .

. " "Grandmaster, I am a Cult Master, and they are Cult Masters too. Why should I hold my head lower than theirs? I am the Human Emperor besides; my rank stood above theirs from the first.

To humble myself and fawn upon them—that I cannot do.

" Shen Mu said, "The Holy Sect has never known the order of elder and younger; whoever attains is the teacher.

They may be former Cult Masters, but a Cult Master has his backbone as well.

Had I not beaten them, they would have said my seat as Cult Master came by crooked means.

Now that they have been beaten, they have nothing more to say. Besides, in their hands the Holy Sect accomplished nothing and their ways rotted—they deserved a beating.

" The Young Grandmaster sighed, and asked with curiosity, "Without a physical body, how do you wield your magic power?

" Shen Mu's heart suddenly flooded with boundless grief, and he did not go on.

In his Sage Eye, the Grandmaster alive and well before him was nothing but a bare skeleton; and when he walked through the city of Fengdu, was not everything he saw the same?

The whole city of Fengdu, the crowds coming and going in their bustling press—all of them were skeletons and ghosts; only he walked through a city strewn with dried bones carrying flesh and blood upon him, solitary, a single shadow.

Even when he laughed and chatted with the successive Human Emperors in the Five Yang Hall, he was speaking with a score of bare skeletons; only at the boundary between life and death had he seen the successive Human Emperors take on flesh and blood.

Such was the scene Shen Mu saw with the Sage Eye passed down to him by the Blind Elder. What he saw was utterly different from what the ghosts of Fengdu saw.

The dead dwell in a world of the living, with life and death turned upside down—but the Grandmaster, the Human Emperors of every age, the Cult Masters of every age, were dead after all. Shen Mu did not speak of this. He was silent for a moment, then smiled: "Grandmaster, you carried out reform alongside the Jingping Imperial Teacher and the Emperor. Now that you have come to Fengdu, how is the reform to keep walking forward? " The Young Grandmaster walked shoulder to shoulder with him, to keep the Dragon-Qilin from crowding in again, and laughed: "Once the way of reform has begun, it does not end.