Chapter 732 — Swift as a Flying Star

And yet Shen Mu, in a single exchange, had sent Senior Uncle Gu flying out of the hall and come down with his foot on him.

"What speed!"

Hu Bugui and the other man could not help but be astonished. Shen Mu pressed on like a galloping horse, storming pass after pass, breaking through more than a dozen halls in a row, and soon he had fought his way to the Jade Pool!

The peasants and peasant women who guarded the Jade Pool were stronger still, of higher realm; a higher realm meant greater talent and greater effort. Yet when Shen Mu arrived there his momentum did not flag in the least, and he went on shattering hall after hall at a speed that made the jaw drop!

"Has his martial way become divine?"

Hu Bugui and the other man had barely formed the thought when they saw Shen Mu fly out from the shattered rear door of the last hall of the Jade Pool, a stream of qi and blood running across the sky behind him, his feet coming down upon the Jade Pool, treading the waves as he came, hurrying toward the God-Slaying Platform.

The God-Slaying Platform stood high above; though it was called a platform, it was in truth like a jade mountain with steps beyond counting.

They could scarcely make out Shen Mu's figure; they could only see the rainbow of qi and blood streak across the sky, rushing straight for the summit at a terrifying speed!

"I cannot hold on!"

Suddenly the woman's voice came from the God-Slaying Platform. Hu Bugui and the other man turned quickly to look. The woman turned her head and smiled a lovely smile, and in the smile was an apology: "Senior Brother Hu, Senior Brother Lu, in the next life..."

Blood-light flashed at her throat, and her primordial spirit, together with her body, was beheaded by the two streaks of blood-light!

Hu Bugui and that Senior Brother Lu looked bleak. "Go well, junior sister..."

Just then a figure shot past them, raising a hurricane that set their robes flapping.

That figure was Shen Mu. Without pausing he mounted the God-Slaying Platform and pointed. At once darkness surged within the platform, and the ground revealed the dark Nether Capital. The woman's primordial spirit, head already parted from body, was falling toward the Nether Capital.

His hands turned and flew, his ten fingers leaping, and strange and mysterious characters kept springing from his fingertips, turning into all manner of uncanny Nether Capital script that circled and danced about the woman's neck.

These bizarre combinations of characters became Nether Capital runes, obscure and hard to fathom, sealing one after another into the woman's neck.

At the same time, the head of her primordial spirit flew back of itself, and joined again to the headless body of her primordial spirit.

Her body was about to fall, falling toward the God-Slaying Platform, and yet it did not fall; blood flowed from the neck of her body, about to be absorbed by the two streaks of blood-light, and yet it did not flow out.

That single instant stretched on so long; time seemed to congeal in that moment.

Flesh and blood surged at Shen Mu's neck, and two more heads grew out; four more arms thrust from beneath his armpits, each working its own art. The woman's head, ringed about by circle upon circle of creation runes, flew toward her neck and settled upon it.

The light of all the runes suddenly blazed with incomparable intensity; the radiance burst forth, so that the two below could scarcely see what passed on the platform. They could only dimly make out Shen Mu standing there with three heads and six arms, raising his hand gently. The Nether Capital on the platform vanished, and the woman's falling figure halted; then, as though time were flowing backward, her fallen figure returned to a standing posture.

The light dispersed. Shen Mu raised his hand and flicked his finger, and the woman was flicked off the God-Slaying Platform at a terrifying speed!

On the platform, the two streaks of blood-light, having lost their target, seemed to fly into a rage, and whirled hissing about Shen Mu's neck!

"The God-Slaying Mystic Blade — I have one of my own."

Shen Mu laughed aloud. "That blade could not cut me down, much less two streaks of blood-aura suppressed to the Life-and-Death Realm?"

At his neck qi and blood surged, coiling like a great dragon; the Eight Notes of the Ancestral Dragon sounded, dragon-cries without end, and drove back the blood-aura that the God-Slaying Mystic Blade had become.

Shen Mu raised his hand and tapped with his fingertips — ding, ding, ding, a string of crisp notes — and the two streaks of blood-aura were beaten back again and again.

Shen Mu strode across the God-Slaying Platform, and only then did the two streaks of blood-aura abandon him. Suddenly they swelled, becoming two blood-aura tornadoes, like two blood dragons writhing on the platform.

Hu Bugui was appalled. He blurted out, "Brother Shen, your body's divine powers have reached full mastery, and you have forged your martial soul as well — but how are you so fast? It has only been ten days..."

Shen Mu, on the far side of the God-Slaying Platform, smiled bashfully and said modestly, "To tell the truth, I have an Overlord Body. I learn anything quickly. I have been like this since I was small; if I learned slowly, my elders would say I was a disgrace to the Overlord Body. This has actually been slow..."