Chapter 1667 — Questioning the Dao in the Chaos Hall
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
"The Miluo Dao Burial.
.
. it must be a joint-attack divine art they comprehended from the Dao-patterns of the Miluo Palace, or perhaps from the Hongmeng runes?
" Shen Mu walked into the chaos, his mind still turning over that single combined strike from the sixty-seven phantom forms of Dao-completers.
That strike had been aimed specifically at the fearsome divine art he had cultivated; he could see it plainly enough.
Facing the Miluo Dao Burial, every divine art and Dao technique of his had been utterly useless, as though completely suppressed, leaving him no strength to resist at all.
Had the blow fallen anywhere else, Shen Mu might not have died, but grievous wounds would have been unavoidable—wounds that in all likelihood could not have healed in a hundred years, or a thousand.
Yet their strike had been delivered inside Shen Mu's own Divine Treasury universe, and there they did not even have the right to wound him.
Of course, that was entirely thanks to the Guixu Lotus he had planted beforehand, which brought his cultivation art to the great unity of birth and extinction. Otherwise, even within the Divine Treasury universe, Shen Mu would have escaped death only to suffer heavy injury.
"Am I so unwelcome in the prehistoric universe?
" Shen Mu frowned slightly.
"In the Ancestral Court's Jade Capital City there are only these seventy-two treasure halls, and yet not one of the hall masters can bear the sight of me—they all join hands to put me to death!
" He could not help shaking his head.
He, the illustrious Heavenly Venerate Mu—where was he not beloved by all, and where did flowers not bloom at his coming?
Had he come into a universe of the past only to be hunted and cursed by every soul?
By now he had reached the foot of that great Chaos Hall.
He raised his head and looked up.
Before him stretched sheer nothingness, a void like the ultimate void.
The Chaos Hall had no stone steps; it stood within that nothingness, and he had no notion how one was meant to ascend it.
Shen Mu hesitated, then took a step, and in the very instant his foot stretched forward, a long flight of stone steps appeared beneath him.
The steps, as though cast from chaos stone, had sprung up out of empty air.
The moment his foot landed upon the step, an unimaginable pressure rushed in, bearing upon him from every direction at once!
The pressure was immense, and its source seemed to be the power of the hall itself—or else Shen Mu's own power, turned to suppress him.
Stranger still, words of the Dao came to his ears, like a dao-question, a deafening shout that pierced the soul and set the mind to reflecting.
The words came from within the Chaos Hall, as though someone were questioning him by way of the Great Dao!
What confounded Shen Mu was that this voice was unmistakably his own.
"What is inside that hall?
Another me, or someone else?
" Shen Mu did not answer the dao-question; instead he braced himself against the pressure, drew back his other foot, and stepped forward again. To his surprise, no second stone step appeared, and before him there was still only nothingness.
The pressure abruptly soared!
"It must be because I did not answer the dao-question from the hall that this change has come about!
" Shen Mu drew his foot back, and the dao-question came again, asked once more. He pondered that dao-question with all his mind.
A dao-question was difficult to express in ordinary language; whether the tongue of gods or the tongue of demons, at best it could convey only a part of the Dao's meaning, never the Dao entire. The dao-question was spoken in the Dao-tongue, the most precise of languages, admitting no misunderstanding—and one might also call it the most universal of languages.
Universal, of course, only for Dao-completers and for the few beings whose Dao arts and divine abilities had reached an exceedingly high realm.