Chapter 615 — The God-Slaying Blade

Shen Mu burst out of the temple and came whistling to the stone steps of the Divine Mountain, then flung himself flat, hiding his body beneath a step. Two thick beams of divine light swept over his head flush against the ground, scorching the mountain's stone slabs to a glowing red.

The moment they had passed, Shen Mu rolled twice, dropped to the steps below, rose, and bolted down the mountain like an enraged dragon, great plumes of smoke rolling behind him. As he sprinted he drove his primordial qi to churn out a fog, so that the whole mountain was veiled in mist.

And yet, from the wound on his neck, his vital blood was spilling out, pulled from his body, drawn into the mountain itself.

That wound had been made by Chixi's fingernail at the edge of his throat.

On this God-Slaying Platform, even the smallest wound could not heal on its own, nor be cured by medicine; so long as a wound remained, the platform would drain the qi and blood from it. The only course was to leave this mountain while he was still alive. Shen Mu was losing vital blood at a terrifying speed.

He did not dare look back to see whether it was the platform or Chixi taking it from him. He could only grit his teeth and race downward.

At last he reached the foot of the mountain, his mind gone blank. From the loss of blood his ears rang like thunder and his eyes went dark and heavy.

Shen Mu sent his primordial spirit out of his body to see the surroundings, while his right hand flew to his Taotie pouch, drew out the dragon spittle, and poured it over the wound on his neck; then he took out a Spirit Buddha Pill to replenish blood and nourish vigor, and swallowed it in haste. He felt his body and was shocked to the core—in this brief moment he had become nothing but skin and bone.

It would take some time of careful rest before he could recover.

To have two takers, the God-Slaying Platform and Chixi, seizing his qi and blood and still not be wrung dry—that in itself was a considerable feat.

"I do wonder whether Chixi was at work behind my blood draining so fast.

" Shen Mu, thin as a bamboo pole, tucked the little box under his arm and staggered forward, away from this uncanny divine mountain, thinking: "My Blood-Dissolving Powder was placed in the water. First he absorbed the blood of Zhe Huali and Qi Jiuyi and used their two lives' blood to wake himself; then he used my three sacks of water to moisten his body, and the powder would have seeped with that water into every corner of his flesh. When he absorbs my blood, the powder will dissolve the blood he has stolen along with it. He woke through blood; once that blood is dissolved, he will sink back into stillness. But if Chixi saw the danger early enough, he may well have held back a portion of clean blood. " A great master of both medicine and poison, Shen Mu knew how one might hold back a portion of clean blood, and he knew where Chixi would have put it: in his eyes—those very eyes that had shot forth the divine light. Only in one pair of eyes would he have clean blood.

Whether Chixi would sink back into slumber again, Shen Mu could not know, and so he had to keep his distance from this mountain. "If he is clever, he will press the water out of his body, let himself dry into a husk, then use the last of the blood in his eyes to stand himself up.

" Shen Mu urged his remaining primordial qi to melt the Spirit Buddha Pill in his belly, thinking: "May he not be that clever.

"

Inside the temple, Chixi knelt like a wooden carving, utterly motionless.

From the fingertips of his six hands thin streams of murky water trickled, fine and turbid, laced with milky-white bad blood.

Shen Mu's Blood-Dissolving Powder could not dissolve his divine blood. What it dissolved was the blood of Qi Jiuyi and Zhe Huali that he had absorbed; and the part of Shen Mu's blood he had taken in was dissolved as well.

After a long time, the water within Chixi's body was completely drained.

He had become a three-headed, six-armed dried corpse, skin stretched over bone, utterly dreadful—yet in the eyes of the head at the front of his body, a glimmer of light moved within the pupils. Chixi carefully divided off a portion of the blood in his eyes, using that little blood to activate part of his body's functions, and rose shakily to his feet.

His other two heads hung low; his six arms drooped helplessly. The blood in his eyes was too little; it could sustain only the smallest measure of his body's functions.

The rest would have to lie dormant for now. He dragged himself toward the temple door, taking a long while to reach the stone steps, and then his legs gave way and he went rolling and tumbling down the Divine Mountain.

Rolling was slower, after all, than the running of Shen Mu, Zhe Huali, and the others; this descent took him the better part of a shichen to get from the peak to the foot. Chixi rested for a long time before climbing up again, and dragged himself about in search of water.

Shen Mu, at a lake in the distance, was poisoning the water with whole bags of Blood-Dissolving Powder when he caught sight of Chixi staggering toward him.

He cast the powder into the lake in a panic and drove his divine ability, and above the lake a mass of cloud formed; from the cloud a divine dragon descended, its tail plunging into the lake and churning it violently.

Shen Mu waved a hand and sprinted off. Hiss—two beams of divine light shot from Chixi's eyes, but they missed him.

He could only watch Shen Mu flee into the distance. "Water—" Rage struck Chixi to the heart; his body could no longer hold itself up, and he pitched forward to the ground.

A mountain in sight can run a horse to death; a lakeshore can walk an ox to death.

He had barely dragged himself this far, and now the lake was poisoned. To reach another source of water would take a month or two—or, if luck ran against him, a year or two. Just then, thunder rolled across the sky.

The rumbling shock woke Chixi.

He turned himself over with difficulty, raised his face to heaven, and opened the mouths of all three heads, waiting joyfully for rain.

The sky filled with dense clouds, lightning and thunder crossing, the dark clouds growing heavier and lower.

On a distant mountain, fiery dragons suddenly rose, one after another, charging into the cloud bank and scattering the rain.

In moments the sky cleared completely, a pure blue, and the black clouds drifted past as white clouds. Chixi turned his head with difficulty, and two beams of divine light shot from his eyes, blasting two great holes in that distant peak. "If I find you.

. .

"

On the other side, Shen Mu, having scattered the rain from the sky, came down the mountain at once.

The peak behind him had been struck down for no reason, two huge gaps blown through its crown. He had recovered a great deal, but his body was still not back at its peak.

"Now there will be no rain for a little while.

I should be safe for a time—rest and tend to myself, and study what this little box is really for.

" He transformed into a black shadow hugging the ground, concealing his tracks, going far from this place, taking every care to leave behind not a single trace; even if rain came later and woke Chixi, the creature still could not find his hiding place anytime soon. After a long while, Shen Mu released himself from the shadow state, showing his form, and took up the little box to study it.

The little box was the center of the God-Slaying Platform.

Its surface was stamped with all manner of patterns and veins, extremely archaic in style—rune imprints of the Chiming Era, he supposed, vastly different from the rune imprints of today. The dharma arts and divine abilities of the Chiming Era must have been different from those of the present as well.