Chapter 1317 — The Old Haunt Grows Dark
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
Without Yue Tianzun's lantern, even with their teleportation arts they would need several days to return to the Hundred Thousand Black Mountains of Great Black Wood, so Shen Mu simply chose a divine mountain at random and settled down there. The Taishi in the egg began to teach him the Dao of Taishi as he himself had comprehended it: "Because I have not fully absorbed the power of the Taishi ore vein, even my understanding of my own great Dao is incomplete.
I am a god born of the Dao of Taishi, yet I am not the Dao of Taishi. Only when I have wholly absorbed the power of the Taishi ore vein and achieved true transcendence will I truly be Taishi. Otherwise, there is no difference between me and the other ancient gods.
" Even so, the Dao of Taishi that the Taishi in the egg had comprehended was far beyond the Dao of Taishi that Shen Mu had puzzled out for himself; the runes of the Dao of Taishi alone were more than Shen Mu had ever managed to arrange in order. The Taishi runes he had comprehended through the runes of the Unchanging divine art accounted for only one third of the true Taishi runes, and among them were many errors besides, and only through the instruction of the Taishi in the egg was he able to correct them.
The Dao of Taishi was exceedingly profound and abstruse, hard to grasp; wherever it was dark and difficult, even when Shen Mu spurred himself to enter the Dao in dreams and comprehend through countless versions of himself, his progress was slow.
In entering the Dao in dreams, he turned within the dream into countless dream worlds, and in those dream worlds were numberless Shen Mus who used their wit and wisdom to fathom hard questions.
This was a means by which he had never failed; even the Great Brahma Heavenly King Buddha could not envy it, nor learn it.
Yet in comprehending the Dao of Taishi he ran into a problem.
In comprehending the Dao of Taishi, the most dreadful thing was voiding.
If he let his guard slip and entered the state of enlightenment, form and spirit would all too often turn together into the Taishi state: possessing form but no substance, an empty shape without a true body.
Even his primordial spirit, his primordial qi, his consciousness and thought would all be voided, leaving only the form without the substance!
Even his divine consciousness would vanish utterly!
Changeless Matter restrained the Dao of divine consciousness, and the Dao of Taishi restrained Changeless Matter, and therefore the Dao of divine consciousness had no power of resistance at all before the Dao of Taishi.
His dream worlds, one after another, were destroyed in that uncanny enlightenment, turned to nothingness, until at last he could not even wake from those dreams, nor withdraw his divine consciousness.
He could not help but feel a lingering dread: if it had been his true body that comprehended, it too would likely have become nothingness, a drifting, ethereal thing without knowledge or desire or want.
He could only grope forward step by step through entering the Dao in dreams, comprehending with the utmost care; even within the dreams he had to arrange that some dreams did not comprehend the Dao of Taishi at all, but kept watch on the outer edges and woke him in time, lest matters slip beyond control and drag his whole being into the state of enlightenment. He comprehended for more than ten days; the progress was slow, yet his harvest was rich, and little by little he began to grasp where the mysteries of the Dao of Taishi lay.
One day, while he was still in his dream, tender green traces suddenly grew out from the rocks of that bare divine mountain: green grass and saplings.