Chapter 1129: Walk Beside Me
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
Seeing this, the Blind Elder and the Silent Craftsman set their hearts at ease; they exchanged a glance, and each gave a small nod. Shen Mu, just as they had hoped, was rousing his own insights amid the hammering; not only had he learned the knowledge the two of them had imparted during their forging, he had made it wholly his own. More than that, he had entered a wondrous state, melting his insights, his comprehension of the Dao, his spirit, and even his very heart of the Dao into the casting. As he forged, halos of light surfaced around his body, and one after another phantom figure of the ancient gods rose from every part of him; halos great and small coiled about those elder deities, emblems of the Great Dao of the primordial cosmos. A resonant Dao-voice rang out, and his insights, his heart of the Dao, his perseverance, his striving, poured with each hammer stroke into the divine weapon taking shape. His Great Dao runes and his divine powers he reduced to the microscopic, and as the great hammer fell they were branded deep into every microscopic particle of the divine weapon, branded with the utmost care. Whenever his vital essence and spirit-consciousness ran dry, he would fetch a mouthful of Primal Elemental Liquid and drink it; and when the divine weapon grew too fierce, he would steep and quench it in that same liquid as well, sparing no expense. When the Silent Craftsman and the Blind Elder had finished forging the Butcher's divine saber, they found Shen Mu still hammering away, neither sleeping nor resting, and could not help but be astonished. Yet the two of them did not read much into it; Shen Mu's studies were, after all, wide and varied, and microscopic forging was bound to be time-consuming and taxing. The two elders rested a good while, then fired the furnace once more to forge boots and gloves for the Lame Elder. Forging treasures for the Lame Elder took even longer than making the Butcher's divine saber; the Lame Elder's cultivation method was unlike any other, and it demanded treasures that could pass with him through every kind of seal and ward, treasures to sharpen his art of thievery. This was a tremendous trial for the Silent Craftsman and the Blind Elder. By the time the two of them had finished the Lame Elder's treasures, more than twenty days had gone by; they let out a breath of relief, turned to look back, and saw that Shen Mu was still refining his divine weapon. Still, by now it was plain that what Shen Mu was forging was also a sword, a very ordinary divine sword, with nothing remarkable to be seen about it. And yet Shen Mu had already brought forth the heavenly palaces of his Divine Treasury of the Primal Fetus, using those palaces to force the branding upon it! "The might of this divine weapon of Shen'er's is likely to be terrifying!" The two exchanged a glance and murmured inwardly. They could see that Shen Mu's divine weapon wore only the outward shape of a sword; in truth it bore his Great Dao and his aspirations, and was not merely a sword but a thing that could change form as it pleased, which was why the forging of it was so complicated. The strange phenomena around Shen Mu drew in; as the last hammer stroke fell, there came a ding, and that blow struck the divine sword, whereupon the sword abruptly shattered with a clatter. The Silent Craftsman and the Blind Elder were startled and rushed to his side, only to see the divine sword that Shen Mu had labored over all these days broken across the ground! It had crumbled into countless motes of dust; because it was microscopically forged, the divine metals and materials had been reduced to the finest particles, all but imperceptible. Shen Mu scooped up a handful of the drifting ash and stared blankly, lost in thought. The Blind Elder hurriedly opened his Holy Pupil to examine those particles, frowned slightly, and said in a low voice, "Silent Craftsman, he means to fuse fifteen kinds of Imperial Throne cultivation methods into one and forge t