Chapter 534 — Jade Face Like a Painting, Sword Like a Rainbow

His primordial spirit trod the Spirit Terrace and unified the Six Harmonies, the sun and moon above his head, the Five Luminaries ranged across the sky. At a single stirring of his vital qi it reached every limb and every bone of him; strand by strand his hair drifted lightly, infused with vital qi. This time, slaughtering on the battlefield, he had seen for himself the strength of another world's divine-arts practitioners; passing through life and death amid the fighting had wrought some subtle, imperceptible change in his state of mind.

Ever since his battle with the First Ancestor, the Human Sovereign, he had sunk into a decline for a time.

Facing a fight, he could not even deliver his own moves, and Zaifu had cursed him roundly for it. It was not that he dared not strike, but that he felt whatever move he made, whatever divine art he used, was wrong. And the reason it was wrong was not only that his confidence and his faith had been shattered by the First Ancestor, the Human Sovereign; it was also that in crossing blades with him, his vision had been hauled in a single leap to a height he had never before imagined.

Standing at that height and looking down on the moves and divine arts he had once learned, every one of them was riddled with flaws.

His vision had risen high, but his foundation was not deep enough to transform him into the next realm, and so when he faced an enemy he felt that whatever move or divine art he brought out would be broken by his opponent, that in the next instant he would die at his opponent's hand.

He had taken his opponent for the First Ancestor, the Human Sovereign; that was the source of his delusion. But on the battlefield, Shen Mu had no time at all to think of such things. The tide of battle shifted from instant to instant, and he could not spare a thought for whether there were flaws; the move came out, and he cut down powerful enemies.

After this one battle, Shen Mu suddenly felt that he stood at the edge of a great transformation.

If only he could step over the threshold, there would be blue sky beyond, and a grand, broad road. Radiance gradually blazed about him; his vital qi circulated within his body, linking the three great divine treasuries, the Spirit Fetus, the Five Luminaries, and the Six Harmonies.

The light given off by sun, moon, and stars shone through the treasuries, so that he was like a man of pure light. Even the Heaven-Man treasury within him was lit up, revealing the treasury's gate.

And below the Six-Spheres treasury, a deep, dark gate hovered, faint and then clear; that was the gate of the Life-and-Death treasury, which connects to Youdu.

Shen Mu walked without haste and without slowness.

In Little Jade Capital he had studied the divine treasuries of the divine man Shen Chongming, wandering a long while within that divine man's treasuries. From that time on he had begun remaking his own treasuries, filling in what was lacking in himself. Whummm.

His vital qi quaked within him, giving out rank upon rank of dragon cries.

Dragon qi coiled about his body, boring in and out of him, tempering his flesh.

Suddenly Shen Mu made his two hands into sabers and, pacing along the rim of the altar, began to cut. The wind rose to a roar.

The saber fell like rain, cleaving by night through the storm of a thousand cities.

The great sun surges up, leaps from the face of the sea; the sun blazes over a thousandfold waves of the Eastern Sea. A gold-inlaid saber in a white jade sheath, by night it pierces the window casement and shoots forth light.

A man at fifty, his merit yet unearned, stands alone with his saber, gazing on the eight wastes. After the calamity, the hero is the people's prayer; every step he walks, smoke the whole way! On that vast, bloody battlefield, Zaifu's saber art suddenly came fiercely alive, mirroring the great calamity of this world. His saber strokes grew faster and faster, and all at once the saber light scattered; wind and rain, the great sun, the face of the sea, all vanished.

Shen Mu pressed two fingers together into a sword, and his quaking vital qi became sword-threads; he lifted lightly and wiped slowly, the sword art infinitely fine, and then suddenly the sword strokes grew faster and faster, and in the blink of an eye a long sword stretched across the sky, like a silver serpent-dragon dancing wild above the altar.

Shen Mu paced the altar with sword in hand, the sword light hissing across the vast empty sky, faster and faster, more and more urgent. The calamity of this world of Taihuang Heaven had stirred something in his heart, and unconsciously he released his moods and feelings through his sword art and his own vital qi.

The third stance of the Sword Diagram: the Sovereign's Calamity Stirs.

Yet at the very fiercest moment of the calamity's eruption, Shen Mu suddenly dispersed all the sword light. His sword-fingers stabbed abruptly at the point between his brows, a point not only between his brows, but at the point between the brows of the spirit fetus and the primordial spirit. All his spirit, all his sword qi, gathered into that single finger. He had comprehended the calamity.

Calamity is disaster; it is the ten thousand peoples struggling to survive in disaster, seeking the hope of life amid hellish suffering; it is a hero like Zaifu cleaving hope out with his saber; it is a Human Sovereign like Lizheng, hacking a trail through the wilds, struggling to live; and it is also the ten thousand peoples struggling and sinking behind the hero.

Flesh and blood, buried bones. His two fingers stabbed forward, one sword like a rainbow, spanning ten li of empty sky. The light of one and a half suns in the heavens went wholly dim, leaving only that single streak of sword light. As that sword thrust out, Shen Mu stood blankly on the altar.

With that one sword he had abandoned Lizheng's Sword Diagram entirely; and all at once he felt that he had a road of his own.