Chapter 1667 — Questioning the Dao in the Chaos Hall
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
Among them, the Dao-tongue raised no barrier and never let one misread another's meaning, and this was likewise why Shen Mu could converse with the prehistoric Dao-completers. In the same way, the dao-question was itself a divine art, a weapon of vast slaughter: if the other's cultivation fell short of one's own and their Dao heart held a flaw, then a single shout of the dao-question could plunge them into self-doubt and self-denial over their own Dao heart!
Emperor Haotian had once used this very trick to injure Shen Mu.
Yet the dao-question that came from the Chaos Hall was not so simple; beyond striking straight at Shen Mu's Dao heart, the question it asked was precisely one of the hard problems he had met in his cultivation.
"Just who is questioning me? " Shen Mu frowned, enduring ever heavier pressure while he wrestled grimly with the answer to that dao-question.
In former days, when he was comprehending the Dao, he had tried to fathom and solve this very problem, but at the time he had too many trivial matters on his hands and had quickly cast the question aside to seek answers in other Dao arts.
Someone had once called him a foolish roe deer, and the description was apt. A foolish roe deer is curious about everything and can discover many mysteries others cannot; but a foolish roe deer has no patience to dig to the root of anything, and so Shen Mu had left many a solvable problem unsolved along his path of cultivation. In truth, with his present vision and experience, turning back to answer those questions was no longer as hard as it had once been.
He set his mind to work, trying to answer this dao-question—and just then the stone step beneath his feet gave a light crack-crack, and hairline fissures appeared across it.
All at once the surface of the step crumbled, and chunks of chaos stone fell away one after another. The chaos stone dropped into the depths below and straightaway dissolved into the nothingness!
Shen Mu held his breath and steadied his spirit, closed his eyes, ignored it all, and kept thinking hard.
Just as it seemed he would have no ground left to stand on, Shen Mu suddenly opened his eyes and spoke in the Dao-tongue, answering the question in the language of the Dao!
At once the stone step beneath his feet stopped collapsing.
By the time Shen Mu had finished answering the dao-question, the step beneath him had, all unnoticed, been restored whole.
Shen Mu let out a breath and reached up to wipe away cold sweat—only then remembering that he was in his primordial spirit form and had no cold sweat; if there was any, it must be his physical body pouring with it.
He had thrown himself wholly into climbing the Chaos Hall, never knowing that at this very moment, outside the Yongjiang Heavenly Palace, the cold sweat flowing from his body had risen past his ankles and become a little pond.
With the first dao-question answered, Shen Mu felt light all over, and the pressure that had seeped in everywhere vanished without a trace. More than that, he sensed that his Dao heart had grown a shade more transparent, and his cultivation had risen a little without his knowing it.
He stepped forward, and this time a second chaos-stone step floated up of itself and appeared beneath his feet. At the same moment, from the lofty Chaos Hall came Shen Mu's own voice again, posing a second dao-question!
And this question, remarkably, was also one Shen Mu himself had met upon his path of cultivation and then cast aside unsolved!
"How interesting!
" Shen Mu's primordial-spirit eyes flickered, and his curiosity about what lay within the Chaos Hall only deepened.
He thought, "Could there be another me inside the hall?
Or is it my own Dao heart that asks?
I truly wish I could hurry in and have a look.
. .
" His present realm corresponded to the Lingxiao realm, the realm that came after the Jade Capital realm.