Chapter 1554 — The Duel of the Dao-Achievers
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
The stroke clove the oncoming rainbow light in two; the halves of that light suddenly gathered with a swoosh behind him and became a fifth Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel. Shen Mu turned, abandoned the blade, and a staff appeared in his hand; using the Taiyi staff as a sword, he stabbed at the mirror face a hundred and eighty zhang high!
Boom! The Taiyi staff pierced the rainbow light and struck Hao Tianzun's blow; the next instant Shen Mu's body quaked violently and was flung high into the air, and then another Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel appeared before him.
Against that mirror face his figure was immeasurably small; the mirror refracted his body, illuminating his flesh and everything within it with perfect clarity!
The him in the mirror stood more than two hundred zhang tall, his five viscera and six bowels shone through and through, and even his divine treasury, his heavenly palaces, his primordial spirit were laid bare!
Shen Mu landed and broke this blow as well — yet the next instant another Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel appeared, greater than the one before!
He fled backward with all speed, and suddenly the ground vanished from under his feet: he had stepped onto the Chaos River, and the soles of his feet were at once eaten and rotted away. Undismayed in the crisis, he turned the Taiyi staff into a small boat that settled on the river's surface; sword in hand, Shen Mu sent blade-light leaping to meet the onrushing myriad-dao rainbow!
Hum, hum, hum!
On the Chaos River, Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheels appeared one after another before Shen Mu; each attack blasted him hundreds of li, driving him from the riverbank all the way to the middle of the Chaos River! Swift as speech, swift as thought, from the moment the Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel flew from Hao Tianzun's palm to the moment Shen Mu was blasted into the Chaos River, only a single blink had passed.
In that blink, Shen Mu had already traded countless moves against Hao Tianzun's one strike. And seen from afar, one could make out only Hao Tianzun's palm thrusting out, a rainbow light joined to mirror faces, mirror after mirror blasting forward while Shen Mu fell back and back, until at last he was driven onto the Chaos River.
By the time he reached the middle of the Chaos River, the Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel before him stood ten thousand zhang high, and in the mirror his primal-embryo divine treasury, his domain, was reflected in its minutest particulars, as though he had no secret left at all! The daos he cultivated, the composition of his heavenly palaces, the sun and moon and stars within his divine treasury, the myriad heavens and worlds, even every arrangement in the Ancestral Court, all were illuminated and laid bare!
His dao arts and divine abilities were mirrored in the Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel in their finest structures, and in the mirror light his primordial spirit revealed its most secret subtleties!
"This is the thirtieth heaven of Hao Tianzun's Dao realm. " Shen Mu's gaze remained keen as ever as he looked upon his own reflection in Hao Tianzun's Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel. Hao Tianzun's Dao realm had indeed reached the thirtieth heaven, truly formidable. His cultivation had already reached the Heavenly Court stage, farther than the other Heavenly Venerables had gone, and that alone was terrifying enough; yet his attainments in the Dao realm surpassed the others' as well!
In this brief clash, Shen Mu had already fathomed the secret of the Myriad-Dao Heaven Wheel: the wheel mirrored an opponent's shadow, parsed the structure of his flesh, the makeup of his daos, of his heavenly palaces, of his primordial spirit, seeing through every secret he possessed. And to see through an opponent's secrets was to break his dao arts and divine abilities, and cut him down!
That Hao Tianzun held the station he did today was not, in truth, owed to his being the Heavenly Emperor Taichu's bastard son; he had his own true distinction.