Chapter 47 — A Third Guest Suddenly Appears in the Trap
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
Before them a colossal dragon coiled about a towering palace, ring upon ring, its enormous head reared high above the great hall, staring toward them!
It was a dragon skeleton, a vast dragon skeleton of bone alone, without flesh or blood; its teeth alone stood taller than Shen Mu!
Though the dragon had been dead no one knew how long, its fearsome majesty was still plain to see; in life it must have been a being of extraordinary power.
Shen Mu opened his Lingxiao Heavenly Eye and looked, and at once the dragon bones before him seemed to come alive, divine radiance surging to the heavens; in his eyes the great dragon seemed to writhe and swim. The dragon was plainly dead, yet such was its bearing, its grandeur, that he felt it still lived!
"The Dragon King of the Surging River, a true dragon..."
Shen Mu gazed at the great dragon, and something stirred in his heart; he thought of Grandpa Ma's boxing art, of the move in the Eightfold Thunder-Cry Formula called Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder. In Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder the yuan qi is divided into nine layers of force; the first layer is the Raging Dragon Charge, the second the Twin Dragons Entwined, and each layer's power adds one more dragon-force to the last!
Shen Mu had practiced boxing at Grandpa Ma's side since childhood, and this move he had practiced more times than he could count, yet he had never grasped its essence. Only recently, with his cultivation greatly advanced, had the might of Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder risen sharply; even so, when he crossed blows with the young monk Mingxing, he had still come off the worse.
To be sure, this was because he had not obtained the Great Thunder-Cry Temple's Thunder-Cry Mahayana Sutra; but more than that, it was because his nine-dragon fist-force was only like a dragon.
Like a dragon but not a dragon, possessing the semblance without the substance, it naturally crumbled at a single touch.
If his fist-force were a true dragon, then even without having learned the Thunder-Cry Mahayana Sutra, his Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder would be true transmission!
For the principle of Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder is to imitate the true dragon's mastery of wind and thunder: thunderbolts of ten thousand jun, the divine dragon pouncing and striking from within the thunder. If he could achieve that, whether or not he learned the Thunder-Cry Mahayana Sutra would not matter!
"Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder, Nine Dragons Ride Wind and Thunder..."
Little by little Shen Mu studied that dragon skeleton; his feet moved without his knowing it, and in his eyes there remained only the bones of the true dragon. He watched the dragon's form, examined the structure of its bones, observed the dragon's momentum, pondered the dragon's cadence, comprehended the dragon's breath, and dwelt in thought upon the dragon's spirit.
More and more he forgot himself; walking as he watched, he even made strange movements, his arms and his body unconsciously imitating the true dragon's every motion.
His yuan qi, too, unknowingly began to course through his body like a true dragon, again and again, filling in ever more detail.
And in the divine palace of his spirit-soul, his spirit fetus moved as he moved, breathing in and out the yuan qi, gradually undergoing a wondrous change. The yuan qi he exhaled did not enter Shen Mu's body but wandered over him, turning into a little dragon; and as more and more yuan qi was breathed in and out, this little dragon grew, slowly becoming a man's height, coiling about the spirit fetus.
Hu Ling'er had been afraid at first, but as time passed the fear in her heart gradually lessened and she grew less frightened; it was only that Shen Mu, absorbed in studying the dragon bones, had forgotten her too.