Chapter 1544 — A Wound That Will Never Heal
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 5
The two sword spheres seemed to exert a wondrous pull upon each other within the taiji diagram, drawing one another along as they revolved around him! As the two sword spheres rotated, the dragon-vein line of the taiji diagram emerged.
It was a supreme sword qi that gathered the Dao of yin and yang and transformed it into the Dao of taiji, indestructible, and with a hiss it sliced through the Dao tree beneath his feet!
Fire Heavenly Venerable's heart lurched again; rising step by step, he climbed to the top of the Dao tree, dodging that terrifying taiji sword Dao.
For the moment he could not see through the depths of this move, so he could only evade it — yet his pair of fiery eyes were closely observing the mysteries of the sword, seeking a way to break it.
Though two of his fingers had been severed, though his Dao tree had been cut down, he remained utterly composed; even Shen Mu's swordsmanship, formidable as it was, did not throw him into the slightest panic.
On the little boat, Shen Mu stamped down hard, and the boat at once surged forward, roaring into ring after ring of flame.
Qiang Tianfei shrieked and raged, "Mu Tianzun, have you gone mad? " Those rings of flame were Fire Heavenly Venerable's great divine art of the Dao realm.
To pass through them was indeed the shortest path to close in and strike at him — but it was also the most perilous path of all. Fire Heavenly Venerable was not only the strongest being under heaven in the mastery of Dao fire, but also one of the strongest in magic power.
He had devoured and refined nearly all of the Southern Emperor's cultivation and Dao, and the magic power he possessed was supremely overbearing; moreover, as one of the Seven Heavenly Venerables of Longhan, his foundations were unfathomably deep. That Shen Mu should attempt to pass straight through his twenty-four Dao-realm great divine arts was nothing less than gambling with his own life!
Perhaps this was the greatest difference between the Supreme Emperor and Shen Mu.
In the Primordial Era, though the Supreme Emperor was invincible in the world, he seldom staked his life. That was, to be sure, because his station was too high and his rivals too few, but it was also a matter of his nature.
When the Primordial Era ended and the Creators declined, in the bitter war between the ancient gods of the Blood-Rust Belt and the Creators, the Supreme Emperor did not stake his life either; when the situation turned against them, he simply drifted away, leaving the clans of the Creators to die.
Looking back over the million years from Longhan to the present, he had rarely risked his life — which was why the three Heavenly Venerables Yun, Yue, and Ling had been able to destroy his true body and trap him to death in the supreme divine-sense domain of the Land of the Great Void, and why his primordial spirit had been sealed away by Heavenly Venerable Ling within the Immutable Divine Art.
He had never, in the truest sense, staked his life.
But now Qiang Tianfei and Shen Mu were in the same boat, and that left her no choice but to stake hers.
Qiang Tianfei drove her two baleful god-blades at ring after ring of flame, cleaving open Fire Heavenly Venerable's twenty-four heavens of the Dao realm; the blazing firelight scorched the blood-red God-Slaying Mystic Blades until the air reeked of burning. Fire Heavenly Venerable's magic power was too strong, making the might of his Dao fire terrifyingly fierce.
By the time the twenty-fourth flame wheel was split open, Qiang Tianfei's arms had gone numb from the shock, and both her hands were scorched black as charcoal by the heat conducted through the God-Slaying Mystic Blades. "This brat Mu Tianzun is far too fond of gambling with his life.
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