Chapter 1667 — Questioning the Dao in the Chaos Hall

"The Miluo Dao Burial.

.

. it must be a joint-attack divine art they comprehended from the Dao-patterns of the Miluo Palace, or perhaps from the Hongmeng runes?

" Shen Mu walked into the chaos, his mind still turning over that single combined strike from the sixty-seven phantom forms of Dao-completers.

That strike had been aimed specifically at the fearsome divine art he had cultivated; he could see it plainly enough.

Facing the Miluo Dao Burial, every divine art and Dao technique of his had been utterly useless, as though completely suppressed, leaving him no strength to resist at all.

Had the blow fallen anywhere else, Shen Mu might not have died, but grievous wounds would have been unavoidable—wounds that in all likelihood could not have healed in a hundred years, or a thousand.

Yet their strike had been delivered inside Shen Mu's own Divine Treasury universe, and there they did not even have the right to wound him.

Of course, that was entirely thanks to the Guixu Lotus he had planted beforehand, which brought his cultivation art to the great unity of birth and extinction. Otherwise, even within the Divine Treasury universe, Shen Mu would have escaped death only to suffer heavy injury.

"Am I so unwelcome in the prehistoric universe?

" Shen Mu frowned slightly.

"In the Ancestral Court's Jade Capital City there are only these seventy-two treasure halls, and yet not one of the hall masters can bear the sight of me—they all join hands to put me to death!

" He could not help shaking his head.

He, the illustrious Heavenly Venerate Mu—where was he not beloved by all, and where did flowers not bloom at his coming?

Had he come into a universe of the past only to be hunted and cursed by every soul?

By now he had reached the foot of that great Chaos Hall.

He raised his head and looked up.

Before him stretched sheer nothingness, a void like the ultimate void.

The Chaos Hall had no stone steps; it stood within that nothingness, and he had no notion how one was meant to ascend it.

Shen Mu hesitated, then took a step, and in the very instant his foot stretched forward, a long flight of stone steps appeared beneath him.

The steps, as though cast from chaos stone, had sprung up out of empty air.

The moment his foot landed upon the step, an unimaginable pressure rushed in, bearing upon him from every direction at once!

The pressure was immense, and its source seemed to be the power of the hall itself—or else Shen Mu's own power, turned to suppress him.

Stranger still, words of the Dao came to his ears, like a dao-question, a deafening shout that pierced the soul and set the mind to reflecting.

The words came from within the Chaos Hall, as though someone were questioning him by way of the Great Dao!

What confounded Shen Mu was that this voice was unmistakably his own.

"What is inside that hall?

Another me, or someone else?

" Shen Mu did not answer the dao-question; instead he braced himself against the pressure, drew back his other foot, and stepped forward again. To his surprise, no second stone step appeared, and before him there was still only nothingness.

The pressure abruptly soared!

"It must be because I did not answer the dao-question from the hall that this change has come about!

" Shen Mu drew his foot back, and the dao-question came again, asked once more. He pondered that dao-question with all his mind.

A dao-question was difficult to express in ordinary language; whether the tongue of gods or the tongue of demons, at best it could convey only a part of the Dao's meaning, never the Dao entire. The dao-question was spoken in the Dao-tongue, the most precise of languages, admitting no misunderstanding—and one might also call it the most universal of languages.

Universal, of course, only for Dao-completers and for the few beings whose Dao arts and divine abilities had reached an exceedingly high realm.

Among them, the Dao-tongue raised no barrier and never let one misread another's meaning, and this was likewise why Shen Mu could converse with the prehistoric Dao-completers. In the same way, the dao-question was itself a divine art, a weapon of vast slaughter: if the other's cultivation fell short of one's own and their Dao heart held a flaw, then a single shout of the dao-question could plunge them into self-doubt and self-denial over their own Dao heart!

Emperor Haotian had once used this very trick to injure Shen Mu.

Yet the dao-question that came from the Chaos Hall was not so simple; beyond striking straight at Shen Mu's Dao heart, the question it asked was precisely one of the hard problems he had met in his cultivation.

"Just who is questioning me? " Shen Mu frowned, enduring ever heavier pressure while he wrestled grimly with the answer to that dao-question.

In former days, when he was comprehending the Dao, he had tried to fathom and solve this very problem, but at the time he had too many trivial matters on his hands and had quickly cast the question aside to seek answers in other Dao arts.

Someone had once called him a foolish roe deer, and the description was apt. A foolish roe deer is curious about everything and can discover many mysteries others cannot; but a foolish roe deer has no patience to dig to the root of anything, and so Shen Mu had left many a solvable problem unsolved along his path of cultivation. In truth, with his present vision and experience, turning back to answer those questions was no longer as hard as it had once been.

He set his mind to work, trying to answer this dao-question—and just then the stone step beneath his feet gave a light crack-crack, and hairline fissures appeared across it.

All at once the surface of the step crumbled, and chunks of chaos stone fell away one after another. The chaos stone dropped into the depths below and straightaway dissolved into the nothingness!

Shen Mu held his breath and steadied his spirit, closed his eyes, ignored it all, and kept thinking hard.

Just as it seemed he would have no ground left to stand on, Shen Mu suddenly opened his eyes and spoke in the Dao-tongue, answering the question in the language of the Dao!

At once the stone step beneath his feet stopped collapsing.

By the time Shen Mu had finished answering the dao-question, the step beneath him had, all unnoticed, been restored whole.

Shen Mu let out a breath and reached up to wipe away cold sweat—only then remembering that he was in his primordial spirit form and had no cold sweat; if there was any, it must be his physical body pouring with it.

He had thrown himself wholly into climbing the Chaos Hall, never knowing that at this very moment, outside the Yongjiang Heavenly Palace, the cold sweat flowing from his body had risen past his ankles and become a little pond.

With the first dao-question answered, Shen Mu felt light all over, and the pressure that had seeped in everywhere vanished without a trace. More than that, he sensed that his Dao heart had grown a shade more transparent, and his cultivation had risen a little without his knowing it.

He stepped forward, and this time a second chaos-stone step floated up of itself and appeared beneath his feet. At the same moment, from the lofty Chaos Hall came Shen Mu's own voice again, posing a second dao-question!

And this question, remarkably, was also one Shen Mu himself had met upon his path of cultivation and then cast aside unsolved!

"How interesting!

" Shen Mu's primordial-spirit eyes flickered, and his curiosity about what lay within the Chaos Hall only deepened.

He thought, "Could there be another me inside the hall?

Or is it my own Dao heart that asks?

I truly wish I could hurry in and have a look.

. .

" His present realm corresponded to the Lingxiao realm, the realm that came after the Jade Capital realm.

Lingxiao and the Imperial Throne were two traditional realms, and Shen Mu's understanding of them was not deep.