Chapter 1763 — Far Journey to the Primal Realm, Heroes Every One

"Shepherd Heavenly Venerable, your wounds run deep."

Haotian the Heavenly Emperor, the Tai Yi Divine Axe gripped in his hand, fixed his eyes on the wounds upon Shen Mu's body. More than a year had passed since Shen Mu took his hurt, and still those wounds bled.

The place where the Third Young Master Ling Xiao had wounded him still bore Dao-wounds. They had eased somewhat, but those Dao-wounds were bound to his Divine Treasury, and within that treasury fifty breaches had opened.

So long as the Dao-Slaying Divine Nail remained, it could still hold those Dao-wounds in check; but the nail fettered the motion of his fleshly body, and to meet Haotian in battle Shen Mu had been forced to draw it out, whereupon the Dao-wounds began once more to ruin his body.

The moment he brought his divine arts to bear and stirred his mana, the Dao-wounds lurking in his Divine Treasury would flare and fester!

"You ought to have nursed your wounds."

Haotian smiled. "Once you had healed, the tide would already have turned. The Third Young Master has unknotted the red cord; I have summoned no small number of Dao-achievers from the Miluo Palace; and Jing Ping I have trampled flat. By then you would be a lone man with none to follow him, and I would cast you back into the previous cosmic epoch. But you did not heal. You came at me of your own will, and so your wounds grow heavier and your recovery recedes past all sight. In days to come, you will lose far more bitterly. I need only hold this one battle, and your doom is at hand!"

Hearing this, Shen Mu let out a breath, and a smile surfaced on his face.

An army may be robbed of its marshal, but no man may be robbed of his will.

If even a common man is so, how much more the Heavenly Emperor of the Heavenly Court?

Haotian's ambition and aspiration were gone; all that remained was the notion of holding fast, and for a Heavenly Emperor that is fatal!

Lacking the will to advance, he would sink into the posture of one who only takes blows; the initiative would fall to Jing Ping's side, and as the fighting dragged on, the Heavenly Court's morale would ebb lower and lower while Jing Ping's surged higher and higher!

In this battle, though the Heavenly Court still held an immense advantage in numbers, victory and defeat had quietly begun to reverse!

Haotian came at him, axe in hand. The Way of Tai Su answers every call, transmuting into the Tai Yi Divine Axe, which can sever the World Tree, and Shen Mu's World Tree he had indeed severed once before.

This time he need only sever Shen Mu's World Tree again; even if he could not kill Shen Mu, he could bring his Divine Treasury crashing down once more!

Shen Mu's Divine Treasury was already battered past repair. Should the World Tree be felled, and with no World Tree to bear it up, the starry cosmos and the Thirty-Three Heavens within that treasury would collapse again, be annihilated, and return to chaos!

And then, how much fighting strength would Shen Mu have left?

And then, Shen Mu would be utterly powerless to stop him from slaughtering Jing Ping's armies!

The Shen Mu of this moment was a spent arrow at the end of its flight!

Even if he could not sever Shen Mu's World Tree, he could simply endure until Shen Mu's wounds burst open, and the outcome would be the same!

In Haotian's hands, the Tai Yi Divine Axe transmuted from the Way of Tai Su was a thing of startling brilliance. As the second being in the early years of Longhan to open a Divine Treasury, and the second of Longhan's Nine Heavenly Venerables, his divine arts were well-nigh perfect!

Though Haotian had lost his Dao Tree, lost his Dao Flower, lost his own Guixu Dao-body, he still possessed the wherewithal to achieve the Dao through sheer force, and still possessed the perfect Great Heavenly Court, its Thirty-Six Heavenly Palaces and Seventy-Two Treasure Halls!

The Third and Fourth Young Masters still stood behind him; the hall masters of the Miluo Palace would still lend him their strength!

The Tai Yi Divine Axe turned, its divine might past all fathoming, carrying the momentum to hew the world itself open!

Shen Mu's eyes shone bright as snow. His three Saint-Pupils saw through every secret of Haotian's divine arts, and in the very instant the Tai Yi Divine Axe came cleaving down, he suddenly stabbed out a finger!

The Finger of Primordial Chaos!

As he loosed that finger, all fifty wounds across his body burst open at once, and blood came pouring out!

The Dao-wounds the Third Young Master had left him, he had studied God knows how many times by entering the Dao in dreams, striving within those dreams to learn the myriad Miluo Palace divine arts and methods hidden in the Dao-wounds, and yet he was still far, far from healing them.

For now he could barely hold the Dao-wounds in check; but the instant his mana stirred, suppression became impossible!

At once the Dao-wounds began to wreck the workings of his flesh and to ruin his Divine Treasury!

An agony that pierced him to the heart swept over him, and yet Shen Mu made no sound and kept the smile on his face. When the Void Heavenly Venerable drove the Dao-Slaying Divine Nail into his wounds, he had writhed in torment; now he did not care at all!

He had to overawe his enemy in spirit!

Boom!

The two divine arts collided. In the instant of collision Shen Mu shifted his stance and changed his move: this time it was no longer the Finger of Primordial Chaos but the Seal of the Five Tai.

The Great Dao of the Five Tai lay in his palm, joined to his five fingers, and those five fingers fell one after another upon the Tai Yi Divine Axe in Haotian's hand. The axe, already pierced through by the Finger of Primordial Chaos, now took the Seal of the Five Tai, and burst apart with a thunderous roar!

Haotian's five fingers ran with blood; the webbing of his hand split open.

But in the same instant that Shen Mu changed his move, Haotian changed his as well: his other hand became the Ten-Thousand-Dao Heaven Wheel and pressed toward Shen Mu's chest, and within that wheel the power of thirty tiers of Dao-realm erupted in full!

He knew Shen Mu's fleshly body bore the gravest wounds, and so he struck at that body.

At the very moment his Ten-Thousand-Dao Heaven Wheel pressed upon Shen Mu's chest, Shen Mu's primordial spirit rose up from behind him, took its seat enthroned within his own Heavenly Court, and drove the Immutable Divine Art.

Bang, bang, bang!

Thirty muffled reports came in succession from within Shen Mu's body; his wounds burst open, and at the same instant the power of the Immutable Divine Art erupted, sealing those torn wounds shut again.

Behind Haotian his own primordial spirit flew out, swung up the Tai Yi Divine Axe wrought from the Way of Tai Su, and brought it down in a single stroke at the World Tree behind Shen Mu.

Shen Mu smiled. Before Haotian's primordial spirit could strike the World Tree, the Great Abyss of Guixu abruptly appeared; a lotus turned, and Haotian's primordial spirit was taken within the lotus.

The lotus sank and vanished into the Great Abyss of Guixu.

The abyss rushed shut, and then a flash of axe-light split it open before it could close entirely. Haotian's primordial spirit fled in wretched haste, its whole body ablaze with raging fire of heat-death that nearly refined it to nothing.

In the instant he fled Guixu, Shen Mu's primordial spirit stabbed out a finger. Haotian's spirit held the axe crosswise to block, and the axe face was pierced through once more by the Finger of Primordial Chaos, leaving two finger-holes.

Two holes there were because the earlier Finger of Primordial Chaos had left them, an indelible scar upon the Way of Tai Su that Haotian cultivated!

Such was Shen Mu's Finger of Primordial Chaos: a finger that pierces the Great Dao!