荒墟牧神 - 第23章 荒村少年觸神威 - 雲海書庫

Shen Mu was shaken to the core. "Carrying a stone statue on your back — that is the same as carrying a god?" The Blind Elder said mildly, "To walk bearing a god upon your back, its weight is beyond compare. Back then, when Granny Zhu and the others were trying to save you, Old Man Ma carried one of the stone statues on his back and brought Granny all the way to the riverbank. A stretch of road that short, and even a man of Old Man Ma's strength was nearly broken by it." Shen Mu's scalp prickled. Were the stone statues in this village truly so ponderous? Then who had carved them? And what god was carved upon them? Why should carving them in that likeness make them so impossibly heavy? When he was small he had climbed up on the statues to shit and piss — would the god resent him for that? "Set your mind at ease. The god who carved these idols died long ago. Mu'er, what I set before you is not the statue — it is your eye I am tempering. And what I set before you is no common block of stone, but an image a god made for gods!" The Blind Elder's voice was deafening, setting Shen Mu's eardrums ringing. He bellowed at a bamboo basket beside the stone statue, "Mu'er, the Nine Heavens Eye-Gazing Art opens the sacred pupil. And being a sacred pupil, it must needs behold gods! Behold them with your eyes — behold a god's momentum, a god's grace, a god's aura, a god's bearing, a god's divinity!" Shen Mu's spirit quaked. "Behold gods? Behold the god within the stone statue?" "Let your vital essence enter your eyes and open the first heaven of your mortal eyes!" The Blind Elder's bamboo staff tapped lightly at Shen Mu's solar plexus — and this time with uncanny precision. At once Shen Mu felt his vital essence surge and run, charging toward his eyes! To temper the eyes is a perilous business beyond all others. Shen Mu's vital essence had already begun to temper his body, refining away its impurities and its excess fat, but the eyes are the hardest place of all to refine, all but forbidden ground; one careless slip and a man is blind for life! Shen Mu had once asked the Village Headman how the eyes were tempered, but the Headman had said little, only warning him never to attempt it lightly. Yet here was the Blind Elder driving his vital essence to charge at his eyes, fierce and overbearing, defying every rule of sense! Shen Mu felt a drilling agony in both eyes as his vital essence poured into them in a vast flood. His cultivation of vital essence was exceedingly deep, yet beneath the terrifying depth of the Blind Elder's cultivation it was crushed thin as a thread. How large are a pair of eyes? Yet in that moment Shen Mu felt his eyes were immense beyond measure, vast as the heavens themselves! His vital essence was like a dragon: a colossal dragon entering eyes as vast as heaven — then bursting violently forth, vital essence surging up into the sky like a pillar propping apart heaven and earth, and then that rolling vital essence spread across the vault of heaven, tracing strange and wondrous patterns upon the dome, weaving into a net like the celestial order of the Dao, filling the whole sky. The agony of a moment before vanished in an instant, replaced by a comfort beyond words, a comfort such as he had never known. "Mu'er, remember the pattern in the sky. That is the first heaven of the Nine Heavens Eye-Gazing Art — the Divine Empyrean Heaven's Heavenly Dipper array patterns." The Blind Elder's voice came as though from beyond the sky, remote and infinitely distant. Shen Mu hurried to commit it to memory. With the Blind Elder driving his vital essence, the array patterns of the Divine Empyrean Heaven's Heavenly Dipper were laid out within his eyes, and he could see their flow, their structure, their every detail with perfect clarity — but the Heavenly Dipper array patterns were too intricate and too complex; memorizing them would take time. The Blind Elder urged his vital essence on again and again. After a long while, when Shen Mu's vita