荒墟牧神 - 第1127章 所求皆應 - 雲海書庫

d into tiny bumps, and cold sweat ran down. On the other side, the Third Pillar Ancient God was likewise exceedingly swift, and soon fled through tier after tier of heavens. At that moment, Shen Mu bowed once more and said in a low voice: "Please, little treasure, bring forth the treasures of the Seventeenth Heaven, and slay the mighty foe!" From the Ancient God Egg at the zenith came again a clarion voice of the Dao, mellow as a great bell, rolling like war drums; at the same time, Shen Mu's divine consciousness rose noiselessly into the sky, seeking to probe the mystery within the Ancient God Egg. This Ancient God Egg was unlike the Egg of the Great Beginning: when Wei Suifeng had split the Egg of the Great Beginning, the power within it was roused, all manner of Great Dao patterns spilled from the egg, and the voice of the Dao thundered. But this Ancient God Egg showed no anomaly on its surface and could not be probed from without; only when the egg drew upon its own power, of its own accord opening a channel to vent that power, did Shen Mu have a chance to slip his divine consciousness inside. The various ancestral-court treasures of the Seventeenth Heaven blazed with light and blasted the Third Pillar Ancient God to death; at the same moment, Shen Mu's divine consciousness arrived beside the Ancient God Egg and burrowed into it. The instant his divine consciousness entered the egg, all before him was primordial chaos, vast and boundless, a substance he could not name, nothing like the fluid of an egg. He was about to look closer when that primordial qi suddenly shifted and became a great bell, its walls bearing birds and beasts, insects and fish, the sun and moon and stars, rivers of stars and constellations, the myriad phenomena of heaven and earth. Just as Shen Mu was about to look more closely, the great bell vanished, replaced by a great cauldron, ancient and grey and vast, seated upon thick earthly qi, drifting and sinking, spinning without cease. On the cauldron's walls were reliefs of every kind of ancient god: some with three heads and six arms, some with bird heads and human bodies, some with human heads and serpent bodies, some with ox heads and tiger faces, every form imaginable. Before Shen Mu could see clearly, the great cauldron vanished and a bright mirror surfaced; in the mirror appeared the vast worlds, the teeming multitudes, the rolling dust of the mortal realm, as though the living beings of the cosmos were endlessly evolving within the glass. Then the bright mirror vanished, that strange primordial qi swirled, and out of the mass of purple qi walked a woman of peerless beauty, one glance at whom was enough to steal a heart. "Langwan..." Shen Mu was dumbstruck; the God King Langwan walked toward him, a smile on her face, youthful and nimble, gentle and full of tenderness. When she was about to reach his side, her features suddenly changed into those of another young woman, robed in white, a long sword on her back, small dragon horns sprouting from her brow, her lovely hair draped over her shoulders and streaming down like water. "Bai Qu'er..." Shen Mu's heart quivered; Bai Qu'er walked toward him, her eyes revealing forty thousand years of waiting. Yet her features changed again, becoming the girl he had met on the Yong River; Ling Yuxiu, dressed as a man, appeared before him, her eyes full of mischief and wildness. Of these three women, one was the woman who had drawn Shen Mu so deeply, yet who had cast aside every feeling of her own for the sake of her race's future. One was the Shanghuang Sword God, who, holding to the creed that a single human life outweighs the heavens, had alone taken up the burden of guarding the remnants of Shanghuang, seeking a way to live on in the darkness; and it was likewise because of what had befallen her on the night of the Shanghuang Tribulation that a single meeting had ruined her life, and she had waited bitterly for Shen Mu for forty thousand years. And the other wa