Chapter 604 — A Kindness Received Must Be Repaid

"Shen'er, let me have a look at your eye."

Granny Zhu stared into his eye for a while and saw no Vajra within it. She fetched a mirror and shone it on him, and still there was no trace of the Vajra in that eye. Only then did she set her heart at ease, and she instructed him, "You may use this eye, but do not stir its arts. Meet with danger, and Granny will see to it. When we come before the Woodcutter Sage, you must seal this eye again with the golden willow leaf."

Shen Mu nodded and put the golden willow leaf away.

This was the first time he had looked upon the world through the third eye in his brow, and he gazed about him in curiosity. The world this eye showed him was not the same as what his two ordinary eyes beheld.

With ordinary eyes, one saw only the outward form of a power-wielder; but to the sight of the third eye, everything turned strange and uncanny.

He looked at Granny Zhu, and beyond her outward form he could see her divine treasury clear as day, and even her primal spirit.

Most terrible of all, when Shen Mu looked upon Granny Zhu's primal spirit he found it delicious, and a hunger came over him, a craving to devour her primal spirit!

He had no notion where the feeling came from. It left him hollow with hunger, seized by a dreadful desire to tear Granny Zhu's primal spirit out of her body and swallow it down in a single bite!

The hunger in his belly was utterly real, so real that he felt an urge to devour!

The last time, amid the ruins of Wuwang City, he had opened the third eye for the first time, but Tubo had appeared at once and struck the jade pendant into that eye, and then the Silent Craftsman, the Blind Elder and the rest had forged the golden willow leaf to seal it shut, so he had felt nothing amiss.

Only now, with the third eye open, did he discover what was so uncanny about it.

"Is it the eye that is at fault, or Luofu Heaven?"

Shen Mu suppressed the urge to devour Granny Zhu's primal spirit and pondered. "It should not be Luofu Heaven. Luofu Heaven is one of the demon race's heaven-worlds; even if something here is wrong, it is only a matter of demonic qi. Demonic qi should not make me feel hunger. So the fault lies with this eye after all. Strange. Why should hunger come the moment the eye opens?"

He could find no answer however he turned it over, and could only set the question aside for now. He followed Granny Zhu onward, flying toward the nearest altar.

The Woodcutter Sage and the twenty-four deities had raised many a towering altar inscribed with golden characters, there to offer blood sacrifice to Luofu Heaven and force the Vajra to halt the war. To keep the altars from being destroyed by the demon gods, the Woodcutter Sage would surely guard them; and before the altars were destroyed, the Vajra and the other demon gods would surely hold their troops in place and not clash with Taihuang Heaven.

To seek the Woodcutter Sage at the altars was the best choice.

Shen Mu looked around him. The Luofu Heaven he saw was much the same as the strange visions the Vajra had shown him, and in places even more perilous!

Enormous planets drifted through the skies above Luofu Heaven, and the geomagnetic primordial force of those planets warred with the geomagnetic primordial force of Luofu Heaven, giving rise to violent earthquakes. The earthquakes were terrible in their power, setting off volcanic eruptions, while storms raged at ten, even scores of times the speed of sound!

The hurricanes were like blades, like primordial weapons of the greatest power; wherever they passed, even newly risen volcanoes were ground to dust in that keen wind!

Most terrible of all was the sea. Mountain-high waves raced at a frightful speed, faster even than sound, destroying all in their path!

Earthquake, gale, wave, volcano: these were earth, water, wind, and fire. Surging earth, water, wind, and fire had made Luofu Heaven unfit for any living thing.

So dreadful was this place that even space had grown wildly unstable. Shattered space formed long, narrow rifts across sky and earth, like mirrors of no thickness at all, refracting scenes both near and far.

Some of these rifts stretched on beyond sight; others were a scant two or three feet long. Having no thickness, they were hard to spot, and every step had to be taken with care.

One careless stride across a spatial rift, and a man might well be sliced cleanly in two!

Space was so keen that a man would likely not learn he was dead until he had already been cut apart.

As Shen Mu and Granny Zhu struggled against the towering waves, they even saw a wave ten thousand fathoms high sliced in two by a terrifying spatial rift!

Stars glittered before and behind Granny Zhu, forming the Great Luotian star-force field. By this field she sensed the perils around them, and by it she could also fend off the calamities of Luofu Heaven.

Granny Zhu was already a being advancing upon the divine realm; perilous though Luofu Heaven was, it was not yet enough to threaten her life.

Shen Mu looked about and saw countless wronged souls drifting to and fro across that hellish place, the spirits of demon race folk who had died in Luofu Heaven, and his appetite stirred in spite of himself.

He hastily suppressed his craving to devour those souls, and a chill of fear ran through him. "What kind of monster has this eye made of me..."

Just then they saw, at the heart of the storm ahead, the enormous skeleton of a demon god sprawled upon the waste. However fierce the storm, it could not stir that skeleton a hairsbreadth.

They came nearer. Even sprawled on the ground, the skeleton stood several dozen yards tall. It had wings, and the wings too were bone; its four hooves were like great ox hooves, but of shining gold.

More than that, Shen Mu saw within the demon god's skeleton a host of glowing treasuries floating, each holding sun, moon, and stars, and a stretch of land.

The treasuries were already broken, their continents drowned beneath the waters.

Shen Mu and Granny Zhu entered through a breach in the treasury, and saw that the waters had already flooded over its land, and that the sun, moon, and stars in its sky were shattered and dim.

Stranger still, upon that land there were cities and dwellings, and many houses lay drowned beneath the water.

"This was once a dwelling place of the demon race. It looks to have been destroyed only a few hundred years ago."

Granny Zhu was astonished, and mused, "Could it be that after the calamity befell Luofu Heaven, certain demon gods willingly gave up their bodies, so that demon race folk might live on within their treasuries?"

Shen Mu swept the third eye around him, and far away, above a ruined river of stars, he saw a demon god's palace, battered and half in ruins.

Within this demon god's divine-bridge treasury, a flying bridge linked it to the palace.

He glimpsed within the palace a soul, faint and insubstantial, standing there all alone, and it seemed to him utterly desolate.

He felt an urge to fly over and devour that desolate soul, yet within him there was no hunger now, only reverence.

Of this demon god, only the soul remained.

He had given up his treasury for his own folk to dwell in, that their lives might be preserved; yet his flesh could not withstand the cataclysm of heaven and earth, and his body died.

His folk might have lived on within his treasury for a long while, but in the end the treasury too was shattered by the disaster.

"He spent all his primal spirit, leaving only his soul unextinguished. And yet his folk died all the same. His soul has stood here a few hundred years, I think..."