荒墟牧神 - 第1482章 帝君訓誡少年 - 雲海書庫

Upon the Hundred Thousand Sacred Mountains, Granny Zhu and the others watched Lord Huo and the Zhankong Tathagata with anxious eyes. More than twenty days had passed since the upheaval in the Jade Capital of the Ancestral Court. Shen Mu's condition had held steady all the while, but the state of Lord Huo and the Zhankong Tathagata had come to look far from encouraging. Lofty as the Zhankong Tathagata's cultivation of mind might be, his cultivation base was low, and so long a stretch had left this great Buddha sorely strained. Lord Huo's cultivation base was higher, but in cultivation of mind he fell a notch below Zhankong, and by this point he too was laboring beyond measure. Just then Yan'er came flying over, crying to Granny Zhu and the rest, "Disaster! Our holy land has sprouted!" "Our holy land has sprouted?" Granny Zhu and the others could make neither head nor tail of it. Yan'er said, "I was chatting with Mother about this and that, taking her about to admire the fine sights of our holy land..." Everyone frowned deeply and thought, "This girl is blinder than the Blind Elder. The Hundred Thousand Sacred Mountains may bear the word 'sacred' in their name, but that is only us gilding our own faces. When did this place ever have fine sights?" Yan'er went on regardless: "...and when we came to the main hall at the heart of the sacred mountain, we saw the hall lifted up on two great leaves, its very foundation split apart! Those two leaves are so huge, and they hold the Young Master's holy hall between them, right in the middle, and it looks so pitiful..." The girl's words came out with no head to them at all. The Blind Elder said hurriedly, "Granny, you all stay here and watch over Shen'er. I will go with her and see." Granny Zhu nodded, and the Silent Artisan said, "I will go and look as well!" Yan'er led the two of them flying toward the heart of the sacred mountain. Before they arrived, the Blind Elder already saw from afar two enormous leaves, like two inconceivably vast palms, holding Shen Mu's palace in their centers! Those two leaves had grown out of the charred stump of the Great Black Wood. The Great Black Wood had long since been cut down by Tai Yi, who set a fire that burned it clean away; all that remained were the growth rings the fire had not finished, become tens of thousands of black mountains. And now the mountain at the very center of it all had actually put forth two great leaves, which was passing strange indeed! By this time a crowd had gathered beside the two leaves. Xu Shenghua, Lan Yutian, Emperor Ming, and others were flying to and fro around the stalk and roots of the leaves, examining where the plant had pushed its way out. The great hall held up between the two leaves was the holy hall of the Hundred Thousand Sacred Mountains, the place where Shen Mu dwelt; once, Tai Yi had received Heaven Duke and Earth Lord in that very hall. The hall was by no means small, yet beside those two leaves it seemed much smaller, and no wonder Yan'er had called it so pitiful. The two men came beneath the leaves and gazed up at those two vast expanses, awe-struck. The veins upon the leaves were like the dao patterns of the Great Dao itself, mysterious beyond words; a teeming vitality flowed from them, so that merely standing there one felt one's face aglow with life. Suddenly the Blind Elder saw a mighty man stride up with a great axe in hand. He came beneath the two leaves, swung the axe up, and measured it twice against the stalk, as if about to chop. "You there, fellow! What do you think you are doing?" Emperor Ming came flying, furious. "Who are you? Why would you hack at another man's sapling for no reason at all?" The Blind Elder and the Silent Artisan turned ashen, and when Xu Shenghua, Lan Yutian, and the others arrived they likewise went pale. The mighty fellow's sinews were savage, his frame that of a giant who had split sky from earth, and the great axe in his hand flashed with cold light, as though it held