Chapter 1600 — The Peerless Elegance of That Sword
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
The Great Abyss of Guixu was far more perilous now than when Shen Mu had last come to this place; the tide of light that gushed forth was more violent than ever before, its force far greater. Even they, Celestial Venerables though they were, could not help but feel their hearts quail before Guixu as it was at this moment.
Ever since the Heavenly Court had moved into the Ancestral Court and the Heavenly River had returned to its original course, the power of Guixu had multiplied many times over; and now that the Empress and her sister had been fused into one, the might of Guixu seemed to have been elevated as well, in some intangible way.
Shen Mu and Gong Tianzun stood face to face in silence. Neither struck immediately; in their minds, each was weighing every possibility.
They were the two beings with the most powerful divine consciousness in the present world.
Divine consciousness is thought-consciousness — save that it is far stronger, far purer than the thought-consciousness of ordinary people. Only when thought-consciousness is elevated into the divine realm may it be called divine consciousness.
Divine consciousness serves many functions.
Besides enhancing the potency of one's divine arts, it can forcibly extirpate the opponent's thought-consciousness, or even seize possession of the opponent's life. But divine consciousness has one supreme advantage: in an infinitesimally short span of time, it can deduce countless possibilities, and thus move a step ahead of the opponent!
It can even bring every future move of the opponent within its calculations! Some call this ability prophecy; but to masters of divine consciousness, it is nothing more than a probabilistic algorithm — figuring out all of your moves in advance.
For powerhouses such as Shen Mu and Gong Tianzun, whose divine consciousness stood at the very summit of this world, they could combine that consciousness with the opponent's arts and techniques to divine the opponent's subsequent movements.
Yet when two beings of roughly equal divine consciousness clashed, the variables became far too numerous. Neither Shen Mu nor Gong Tianzun, in cultivating their divine consciousness, had ever refined and devoured the divine consciousness of another, much less accepted the worship of others.
Even Shen Mu, having obtained the Great Emperor's divine consciousness, had never refined and absorbed it to raise his own cultivation. Had he resorted to such an opportunistic shortcut, his probabilistic calculations would have been tainted by the influence of sundry jumbled divine consciousnesses; it was precisely due to this that the Great Emperor's attainment had never come to perfection.
It was also for this reason that Long Xiao, the Lord of the Beast Realm, was somewhat deficient in wisdom.
Both Shen Mu and Gong Tianzun strove to keep their divine consciousness pure, guarding against the corruption that temptations might bring. Gong Tianzun, for all the contemptible dependence on men for which she was known, possessed an incomparably tenacious, forbearing will — decisive, resolute — and in that there was much to admire.
The divine consciousnesses of the two whirled at lightning speed; each of their auras surged ever stronger, ready at any moment to burst into a thunderous strike. Cold sweat beaded drop by drop on Gong Tianzun's forehead.
She was encountering tremendous difficulty in calculating the moves Shen Mu might unleash; only now did she realize that what Shen Mu had learned, comprehended, and refined was so enormously complex, filled with every manner of unknown arts and divine techniques.
Her own arts and techniques, by contrast, had been probed by Shen Mu again and again — during that attempt to refine him in the Heavenly Court, when she had struggled against the Shen Mu within the Myriad Dao Heavenly Wheel!