Chapter 1669 — Two Figures Alike
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
This Heavenly Lord likewise wore Shen Mu's face; he was one of Shen Mu's divine avatars. After a long while, the face of the Heavenly Lord Shen Mu faded from sight.
Upon the stone steps, Shen Mu propped his chin on his left hand and brooded in bitter thought, not knowing where he had gone wrong, nor why the Chaos Hall had a hall but no door, nor why he could not enter.
Suddenly a voice came from behind him, chanting in long, drawn notes: "Chaos swaddled and shrouded like an egg, dim and silent, filling the void. The vast Taishu embraces Hongmeng!
The one qi cycles, dense and grave.
" Startled, Shen Mu turned to look: there within the Chaos Hall, a mass of Hongmeng purple radiance wrapped about a figure of light was threading through the chaos, walking outward.
That voice was a Dao-sound, spoken in the Dao-tongue; when it spoke of chaos swaddled and dark, the Dao of Chaos and Taiyi truly flowed within the sound; when it spoke of dimness and silence, it was as though the cosmos were not yet split and heaven and earth not yet opened — the very scene of chaos! When the voice within the light spoke of Taishu, the Dao of Taishu circulated; when it spoke of the one qi, the Dao of Taichu was truly stored within it.
Shen Mu rose to his feet and stared blankly at the figure walking out from the Chaos Hall. The man's tread was heavy and firm; his form seemed to walk from an age immeasurably ancient toward the present, and the light about him was as though, in passing through one great tribulation of destruction after another, the cold gleam of the wind of cold silence and the firelight of the wind of heat-death wove and interwove ceaselessly around him.
In the blink of an eye, Shen Mu saw that figure pass through seven layers of the great tribulations of destruction, drawing nearer and nearer! And the man's voice seemed to come from a prehistoric cosmos — not the sixteenth cosmic epoch, but a cosmos more ancient still!
"Within lie hidden true water and true fire, coiled and veiled as ice. At the center the Primordial Origin works the mysterious art!
The three qis divide, all in great stillness.
" That figure passed through sixteen great tribulations of destruction and at last reached the edge of Shen Mu's Chaos Hall, about to step out from it, and his Dao-sound grew ever clearer as he said in admiration: "What a Chaos Hall! Standing at the end of time and space, it guided me to this place! This is the cosmos of the future seventeenth epoch, is it not?
" He halted before the last layer of chaos qi, unable to take one step further and walk out of Shen Mu's Chaos Hall.
Shen Mu stared at the figure in a daze, shock beyond measure in his heart.
In a cosmic epoch already destroyed, there existed an incomparably mighty being who, when Shen Mu cultivated to the chaos realm, had actually followed the chaos qi within the Chaos Hall and come to this place!
Of course, this person had walked here from one great cosmic annihilation to the next, taking the chaos qi that a cosmos' destruction turned into as his medium. Shen Mu's case was exceedingly peculiar: his spirit treasury had passed through birth and death no one knew how many times, and the World Tree within that treasury had once entered the Jade Capital City of the Ancestral Court, absorbing the chaos qi produced by each cosmic destruction to strengthen itself, so that his spirit treasury became linked to the destruction-tribulations of those cosmic epochs. And his Chaos Hall had thus formed the passage linking those epochs' great tribulations of destruction.
Shen Mu had never returned to a past cosmos, had never lived through those great tribulations of destruction; yet he could well imagine such a scene.