Chapter 1784 — Two Sounding in Unison
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
At the altar now all was chaos: Emperor Haotian hung pinned in midair, the Mistress of the Hall of Joy drove at Yue Tianzun, Yue Tianzun plucked her strings to trouble the Fourth Young Master within the Destruction Calamity of the Sixteenth Era, Shen Mu laid hands upon the Fourth Young Master's lute string, and the four Elders dealt death to all without mercy. The altar split apart, and Emperor Haotian was freed at once from his state as sacrifice, yet before his feet could touch ground he met the Third Elder Cang Yancui and was slapped flat to the earth with a single palm.
At the same instant Shen Mu's fingers fell upon the string, and two fingers stroked heavily forward along it!
The Tiandu Chapter of Opening Heaven!
A shaft of light howled away along the string and vanished into the time and space of the past.
The universe of the Seventeenth Era already bore six billion years of history, and Shen Mu's divine art, following this string that joined past time and space, retraced six billion years in a single instant.
In that brief blink, borne by his art and the Fourth Young Master's string, he saw his power travel back from this moment to the first sealing of the Ancestral Court, pass the battlefield of the Creators and the ancient gods, reverse the flow of years to show him an age when giant beasts crowded the Ancestral Court, witness the rise of the Creators and the birth of one ancient god after another.
In the next instant his art carried his sight to a still more ancient age, when the Five Tai had but just taken form, when Taiyi hewed the World Tree and wildfire swept the plains. Then his art bore his sight through the Creation Calamity and into the Destruction Calamity! Within the Destruction Calamity chaos stretched vast and boundless, and there, magnificent beyond compare, stood Yujing City of the Ancestral Court amid the chaos, baptized by the great calamity yet ever renewed and never broken.
Shen Mu's art raced through the string and rushed along it into Yujing City.
In Yujing City, beneath a dao tree, the Fourth Young Master Zixiao in brocaded robes sat beneath his own dao tree stroking his lute, forefinger pressed upon a single string.
Boom!
The might of the Tiandu Chapter of Opening Heaven burst from the string, and with a hiss a small joint of Fourth Young Master Zixiao's forefinger snapped off, and he could not hide his surprise!
To lose such a joint was no grave wound to him, and versed as he was in the art of creation he could soon regrow it, but that this art could invade along his own string and be perceived only when it reached his very presence, that was beyond belief!
"Seventh Brother, you have some skill!
" Fourth Young Master Zixiao regrew his severed finger, uttered his praise, then stroked his ancient lute with light plucks and slow glides, calm and at ease.
On the other side, Shen Mu had just unleashed the Tiandu Chapter of Opening Heaven to strike the Fourth Young Master unseen, when his two fingers burst apart with twin cracks. The Fourth Young Master's art had traveled back along the music to his fingers in the same instant, and even his Hongmeng body could not withstand it.
Shen Mu's burst fingers dissolved at once into chaos qi and reformed anew as two fingers, and his Dao of Taiyi trembled and turned into the Taiyi divine axe.
Emperor Haotian had just scrambled up when he saw Shen Mu swing a colossal axe down toward the back of his own head, its art so exquisite that even he could not read the axe-work, much less know how to dodge.
"Mu Tianzun hates me to the bone and means to kill me!
My life is done!
" He had just thought this when he saw Shen Mu's axe go wildly astray to cleave empty air.