Chapter 573 — Elder Brother Makes His Move and Binds the Flood Dragon

The divine dragon was slightly taken aback; the pupils of its dragon eyes kept contracting, narrowing, focusing, and came to rest upon Shen Mu.

Its eyes were immense beyond measure. Were Shen Mu to walk up before it and stand upon its lower eyelid, he could not have reached the upper lid with both arms stretched high.

To be watched by those two dragon eyes was no comfortable thing.

The divine dragon's gaze brimmed with majesty, and that dragon-majesty chilled a man to the marrow, filling his heart with awe and with dread.

Shen Mu seemed not to notice at all. He paced slowly, surveying the furnishings within the shrine. There were many murals in the great hall, but most had been destroyed.

The dragon race loved grandeur and great deeds, and delighted in carving their exploits upon murals; they adorned their palaces sumptuously, all glittering gold, and with those murals recounting their glorious achievements, dwelling in such a place was a joy to body and mind alike.

In this hall the murals had been destroyed, and worse, the palace's treasures had been plundered clean. Incense burners and screens, jade couches and teapots, paintings, calligraphy, zithers and chess sets, all of it carried off; he even saw on the walls pit after pit left behind where night-pearls had been pried out. Nor was that all: many floor tiles were missing from the hall, and judging by the run of the remaining tiles, the place prised open was precisely the center of the hall, where there should have been an exquisite picture proclaiming the wealth and the rank of the hall's master.

Those tiles had been levered away as well, exposing the bare stone beneath, glaring to the eye.

The exposed stones were covered in runes. Shen Mu studied them closely for a while, and left them untouched.

"So the one who plotted against me is your founding patriarch?" the divine dragon asked, its voice heavy with wrath.

"Not my patriarch. My eldest senior brother."

Shen Mu searched meticulously, hoping to turn up one or two treasures the founding patriarch of the Heaven Sage Sect had carelessly left behind, and at last made the rueful discovery that if this founding senior brother had gone to scrub backs in a Jingping bathhouse, his business would surely have thrived.

The place had been scrubbed so spotless by the founding patriarch, scraped so thoroughly, that nothing worth carrying off could be found.

Unless, that was, Shen Mu took for himself the founding patriarch's great cauldron and the ten li of yellow sand, or dismantled this hall and carried it away, which was impossible, for hall and cauldron alike were treasures meant to suppress the divine dragon.

"In the ten li of yellow sand, I saw the star-sand gather and become a Star-Sand Evil Eye. The sequence of its stars, the way their starlight links them, and the very nature and composition of those stars are precisely the divine-power array of my Heaven Sage Sect's Great Nurturing Netherworld Demon Sutra."

Having searched a long while to no avail, Shen Mu finally met the dragon's gaze and said, "The moment I saw that, it came to me in a flash: this Ten-Li Star-Sand Tribulation Array is something I have already learned. It lies hidden within the Great Nurturing Netherworld Demon Sutra. And once I grasped that, though the array can strangle a true god, it became far simpler for me, which is why I could walk out of it alive."

He circled the chain-bound dragon twice, unhurried, and said, "Yet even then I dared not be certain whether this killing array had been left by my senior brother, so after I walked out of the Star-Sand Tribulation Array, I went to examine closely the divine markings on the cliff walls and the demon script upon the chains."

Jiang Miao followed at his heels, circling the dragon twice, and mused, "So when you said that to act as one's nature dictates, purely following what is natural, and that it mattered not to you whether one be god or demon, those words were not spoken to me, nor were they any insight of your own?"

"Those words I read from the divine writing and demon script my senior brother left behind. What I spoke of was the cultivation of his state of mind."

Shen Mu came around to the dragon's front, halted, and explained, "My eldest senior brother is the founding ancestor of the Heaven Sage Sect. His cultivation of the mind has reached a very high attainment. The Heaven Sage Sect holds that there are three establishments by which one becomes a sage: establishing the teaching, establishing words, establishing merit. My senior brother has established the teaching and established words, but he has not achieved merit, and so he cannot become a sage; he has not cultivated to the realm of the Woodcutter Sage. Yet among the sect masters of every generation, not one besides him has managed even two establishments. That is why the one who could suppress the divine dragon could only be him, and no other sect master."

"Then why did your senior brother suppress the divine dragon?" Jiang Miao, too, came to a stop, greatly bewildered, and asked.

"That is a question for this senior divine dragon."

Shen Mu raised his head and looked up at the divine dragon. The dragon was so immense that even bound in chains, with all its divine transformations fettered, its colossal body coiled upon itself was still enough to make them crane their necks.

Its whiskers hung down like strands of rosy cloud drifting to and fro, full of life. In a being so divinely martial and extraordinary, no trace of evil could be seen.

Shen Mu asked, head tilted back, "My senior brother chained you to establish merit and become a sage. So what evil did you do, that he should pen you in this place and chain you here? I beg you, senior, to enlighten me!"

The divine dragon had watched with cold eyes as he circled round and round. Suddenly the corners of its mouth drew back, baring keen teeth, and it laughed: "Such a clever child, and why must he be the one to die? You are so clever; do you not know that sometimes to be a little foolish is to live a little longer? To see through a thing and not say it, to hold understanding in your heart and feign ignorance, that is how a man lives long."

Jiang Miao shuddered and lifted his head. "Then to what end has senior been calling to me all this while?"

The dragon's enormous body twisted; its neck swept through a bizarre arc, and the chains were drawn taut as bowstrings. It fixed its blazing eyes on Jiang Miao, its long muzzle coming near enough almost to touch Shen Mu and Jiang Miao both, yet held by the chains it could not quite reach them.

Shen Mu had led Jiang Miao in circles around it at a distance exquisitely calculated, just beyond the reach of its attack.

The breath the dragon exhaled rippled the skin of both their faces into folds. "Naturally, to call you here to free me, son of the Surging River Dragon Emperor..."

Jiang Miao blinked, dumbfounded. "You know me?"

"Of course I know you."

The dragon stretched its body, as if to unfurl itself from its coil; but the chains ran through its flesh and it could not uncoil. Even so, it set the whole palace shaking and quaking without cease.

"Come to think of it, you are my nephew. When you were newly born I held you in my arms; you pissed on me, and I flicked your little pecker with one finger."

Jiang Miao's face flushed crimson. He glanced back at Shen Mu, looking miserable, and said in a low voice, "Sect Master, please do not tell anyone about this..."

Shen Mu laughed. "What of it? When I was small, Blind Grandpa and Lame Grandpa were always flicking mine, and that is an elder's affection. Besides, before you opened your spiritual awareness, only a few days ago, when I was asleep, you licked my face all over, till it was covered in your slobber."

Jiang Miao's face was red as freshly dyed cloth. He stammered, "Can we please never bring that up again either?"