Chapter 632 — Where I Stand, There Is Youdu

"Who are you?

" Shen Mu cried out in alarm.

From his own mouth came a voice, clear and ringing, yet laced with an innocent evil: "I am—" Above his head the Buddha's great hand had already come pressing down, and all at once Shen Mu felt another "self" within him stirring awake; the sensation was so strange that he felt himself split in two. "—Shen Fengqing!

" The moment the voice fell, Shen Mu's original consciousness dropped to second place and became a mere onlooker.

More terrifying still, as that other "self" emerged, a power welling up from who knew where flooded his body in an instant, so vast, so dreadful, so evil that Shen Mu's former cultivation, with his consciousness, could only hold fast in one small corner and watch the wickedness fill him to the brim.

"The primal spirits I have stolen are still too few, nowhere near enough to break Earth Lord's seal. Earth Lord, that great villain. .

. but if I kill this Buddha, I can break more seals!

" Shen Mu heard a strange, arrogant infant's voice issue from himself, a voice bearing evil, a chilling evil; the tongue it spoke was the speech of Youdu, freighted with a strange sorcery, flaunting, utterly fearless, and at once boundless in its greed, as though it were the union of every base desire. "Where my body stands, there is Youdu—" Shen Mu saw darkness spread out from within his own body and taint the Great Brahma Heaven, the highest heaven of the Buddhist realm. In the Great Brahma Heaven there was eternal day, golden radiance like a sea, and now a great swath of that golden sea went suddenly dim.

As though a drop of ink had fallen into a basin of clear water, the darkness invaded; the golden sea was polluted and turned black, and the reach of the darkness grew ever wider.

The supreme holy ground of the Buddhist realm was transforming into Youdu. The Buddha's great hand had already descended, blazing with Buddha-light, but in the next breath it was swallowed by the darkness.

That Buddha cried out in shock and drew his hand back from the black demonic breath of Youdu, and saw that the plump, golden Buddha-hand had turned to bare white bone, the flesh upon it gone as though it had flown away.

It was a divine power utterly unlike those of Jingping, of Taihuang Heaven, of the Buddhist realm or the Heavenly Court: a power that held death in its grip and seized the life-force of all that existed to make it its own.

Shen Mu sprang up, laughing heartily, and pressed his five splayed fingers down onto that Buddha's head.

A thunderous boom! A violent shock rolled out; the Buddha was crushed bodily onto a golden island, and the island burst apart with a roar, the heavens collapsing and the earth splitting.

Shen Mu saw that his own body, too, was undergoing a wondrous change: it was growing with frantic speed, taller and taller, larger and larger, while his years seemed steadily to recede, so that he grew ever younger, ever more like a small child. Fortunately the garments forged for him by Yu Zhaoqing, chieftain of the Tianyu clan, were no common things, made from the finest stuff of the Tianyu clan and a formidable yuan-arm spirit treasure in their own right, able to grow and shrink with his fleshly body.

By now he stood more than ten zhang tall, yet his years had shrunk back to the look of four or five, so that he seemed a lovely little boy, clear as snow.

Yet lovely as this boy looked, his strength was without limit and his savagery without bottom, and he smashed that Buddha's skull almost to a pulp.

Nor was that all: with one hand the "little boy" hoisted the Buddha up into the air, opened his mouth, and drew a great breath.

Buddha-light surged all about that Buddha as he strove with all his might to resist, yet his primal spirit surfaced against his will, drawn a little way out of his body again and again before shrinking back within. The Buddha struggled without cease; his divine treasuries rose up one after another, and his primal spirit, standing before the gates of his heavenly palace, could find no footing, again and again nearly sucked clean out of the palace.

Shen Mu found that his years had shrunk once more: a moment ago he had been four or five, and now he was not yet three. Just then Dharma King Molun came flying in with a howl, and a seal like a wheel crashed into the middle of Shen Mu's back.

Shen Mu went tumbling over and over with the Buddha in his grip, skidding across the golden sea dozens of times and smashing several mountains down before he came to a stop, and by then he had drawn the Buddha's primal spirit out with a single breath.

Yet the Buddha's primal spirit did not fall into Shen Mu's mouth; it twisted and spun and sank into his third eye.

Aghast, Shen Mu suddenly understood.

He understood at last why the Shenwang Hall had collapsed after King Yama of Fengdu suppressed the seal upon his jade pendant, and why King Yama had been wedged among the pillars; he understood at last why Vajra, mighty as he was, had been struck down the moment he touched the jade pendant, his chest bursting open, to lie unconscious and jammed within an altar. He understood, too, why Wuwang City had met its unlooked-for calamity, and why Earth Lord had insisted on meeting him in Youdu, to lay the seal within the jade pendant anew.

He had once thought it no more than a curse set in the pendant's seal; never had he turned his thoughts upon himself, and in those several cataclysms he had always fallen into a deep sleep, never knowing what had truly happened. And now he understood at last: the true curse was himself, or rather the other "self" within his body.

Before, he had slept because that other self was too strong and took possession of his flesh; now he was awake because Earth Lord's seal was too strong, and the other self could not fully shake it off, so that two consciousnesses dwelt in one body, awake at the same time.

He had no leisure to ponder further: Dharma King Molun and three other Buddhas were already charging in, treading the Buddha-light of the golden sea, four great Buddhas unleashing every art they had, their divine powers towering to the heavens, their might overturning mountains and seas, prodigies of light reaching to the clouds.

Then suddenly Shen Mu's consciousness took hold of the body, and he sprinted at speed, bringing forth the Sky-Skimming Divine Legs the Lame Elder had taught him, dodging the attacks of Dharma King Molun and the rest in the last instant. The Lame Elder's Sky-Skimming Divine Legs, under his feet, grew extraordinarily swift, all but able to pass through space itself; had the Lame Elder been there, he would surely have gaped, eyes wide and mouth open, unable to believe his leg-art could reach such a height.

Yet Shen Mu now possessed boundless magic power, and he drove those legs to their utmost, passing through a garden of ten thousand flowers without letting a single leaf cling to him, so that none of Dharma King Molun's divine powers could graze him.

"Why can I suddenly command the body? " In the midst of his dodging this doubt rose in Shen Mu's mind; then Shen Fengqing's consciousness came surging back, and that voice, innocent and evil at once, said: "Earth Lord, you have wronged me again! " Shen Mu's consciousness fell back to second place once more.

His body had become an enormous infant, so wildly elated that it churned the seas and rivers, leaping as though it flew, stamping the golden sea until it burst apart again and again, its Buddha-light rising in mountainous waves.

Wherever he passed, the golden sea was defiled: before, it had been no more than a single drop of ink fallen into it, and now the ink was spattering everywhere. He had seized one of the Buddhas and was tearing at him, as though the Buddha were nothing but a rag doll and he a naughty child trying to pull it apart.