Senior Brother Chu was at last seized with terror: "He means to beat me to death with that little wooden stick—to keep beating me until I die!" He truly wished that what the other held were a blade; even a blunt blade would have done. The little stick was of course no great weapon, but by now the swelling on his head and face had festered into blood-clotted abscesses, and the swelling had left him nothing but two slits for eyes, his sight blurring more and more. The skin over his body had been beaten black and blue; several muscles had been pounded into paste; and it was the joints that had received Shen Mu's particular attention. What Shen Mu struck was not the bone of those joints but the ligaments and fascia: the ligaments and fascia of every joint in Senior Brother Chu's body had been shattered by that little wooden stick, so that the slightest movement brought a tearing, lancing agony. To be beaten to death by a wooden stick, little by little—there is nothing more appalling; agony and horror were stretched out countless times over, and yet death would not come soon, not for a long while. By now the herd of beasts that had been galloping overhead was gone: the two of them had fought their way out through the ruin's gateway, and the herd had scattered. Shen Mu's strength was ebbing as well; by this point he had cut heaven knows how many strokes in unbroken succession, and he too could hold out no longer. He and Senior Brother Chu had run and fought beneath the belly of the giant beast, dodging not only the other's sword but the hooves and claws of the monsters, and the ceaseless shifting of his footwork had left both his legs aching and swollen. When he had trained under the Butcher, mad as the man often was, he still knew the measure of training and would not work him to exhaustion. Now he had no strength left to keep cutting; only his will had carried him this far. He knew that if he stopped, and Senior Brother Chu still had even a thread of primal qi, still could so much as stir, his own head would part from his body. He could only keep beating, on until Senior Brother Chu was beaten dead. Thud. Senior Brother Chu could hold out no longer and pitched forward onto the ground; his sword fell with a clang. Shen Mu flung the stick away and seized the sword, but he could not lift it—his arms had not the last of their strength left. Shen Mu raised a foot and kicked at the hilt, bit by bit, turning the point toward Senior Brother Chu. Senior Brother Chu could just barely see it; he squirmed and struggled with all he had, trying to avoid the point, but his bones and sinews were all but wholly destroyed, and he could not shift a muscle by a hair. He could not move, and could only watch as Shen Mu, laboring, adjusted the angle of the point little by little, then kicked the sword bit by bit, letting the edge pierce his throat a little at a time. At last the sword ran through his throat; a gurgling rose in his windpipe, bubbles swam through the blood, and before long he gave up the ghost. Shen Mu's heart eased and he collapsed limp to the ground. It had been too hard—never in his life had he been so hard-pressed. A corpse lay right beside him, and the feeling was truly hard to bear. Shen Mu tried to shift his body; he truly could not move, and so gave up the thought. It was not the first time he had seen a corpse: the woman who had crawled out of the cowhide by the riverside, and Senior Brother Chu's two junior brothers, had all become corpses. Once Granny Zhu had taken him to a neighboring village to deliver a woman's child—besides cutting and sewing clothes, Granny Zhu was in ordinary days a midwife as well, delivering the women of the villages round about. When they arrived, every soul in that village was already dead—men and women, old and young, including the woman who had been waiting to give birth. At the time Shen Mu's mind had gone utterly blank; he felt himself drift free of his body into the air, floating weightless above the village, looking down at the carnage below. It was Granny Zhu who afterward woke him. She said the fright had driven his soul out of his body, that he had lost his soul, and that she had pulled his soul back and stuffed it into his body again. Granny never said who had killed the people of that village; she only told him that such things were very common in the Wasteland, and so... "Never leave your enemy the least chance," Granny Zhu had told him, very gravely. Senior Brother Chu's corpse made him uneasy, but the Wasteland was just such a place: the weak are meat for the strong, and the fit survive. Shen Mu had lived here since childhood and had grown used to the monstrous beasts of the Wasteland tearing one another apart; Senior Brother Chu's corpse was no different from the corpse of any other beast. He was just evening out his breathing when footsteps suddenly came. Shen Mu forced his head around toward the sound, and his heart lurched: Senior Sister Liu was limping toward him, a sword in her hand, her face swollen up like a pig's head, her features past all recognition. Shen Mu struggled to rise, and every limb, every bone, every muscle cried out with pain and swelling, so that he had to stop, panting hoarsely, and silently set the Mystic Body Three-Core Art to work. His primal qi slowly quickened and slowly surged up, flowing into his aching muscles and torn sinews; where the qi passed, the swelling eased somewhat, but his senses grew keener still, and a scorching agony came with it. Senior Sister Liu still came limping on. This woman's legs had been left half-crippled by his kicks when she matched legwork with him, and her face had taken heaven knows how many kicks, the cruelest of all the last, into which Shen Mu had thrown his whole strength. That kick, like a venomous dragon lashing its tail, had flattened her pretty face; now it had swollen up, puffing out like dough left overnight. The teeth in her mouth had likely all been lost; from the corners of her lips a drool of bloodied water still trickled, drip, drip. Yet her hand was steady, and the sword in it still flashed cold light; plainly the hatred in her heart was a heaven-high flood, and she meant to cut Shen Mu into ten thousand pieces. Shen Mu drove the Mystic Body Three-Core Art harder, wanting to recover some strength, but the desperate battle just past had left his body far too exhausted. Only one who has opened the Primal Embryo Wall and absorbed the Primal Embryo Divine Treasury counts as a true martial artist. He was not yet a martial artist, and yet he had beaten a martial artist like Senior Brother Chu to death with his own hands—already a remarkable feat. But that was all it was. He had no strength left to fight Senior Sister Liu. At last she came up before Shen Mu. She wanted to speak, but her mouth and throat were so swollen that no sound would come, so she raised her sword and stabbed viciously down at Shen Mu. "What a darling little girl—Granny likes you ever so much at first sight." Senior Sister Liu's body went rigid; the sword met an invisible barrier and could not drive down. Terror came into her eyes as she saw a tiny old woman coming on tiptoe with a basket on her arm. Senior Sister Liu trembled all over and slowly backed away, and behind her a resonant voice sounded: "Shen'er, my Slaughter Blade Art, and you've turned it into a little wooden stick—it took you five thousand four hundred and seventy-six cuts to bring this brat down, and in the end what killed the little wretch was a sword!" Senior Sister Liu turned her head with difficulty and saw several strange-shaped people coming: a blind old man with a bamboo cane to feel his way, a lame old man short a leg, a grotesque whose four limbs had been hacked off, and a burly man with a face full of brute flesh who had nothing left below the chest. The half-bodied burly man had been packed into a bamboo basket and carried there on someone's back the whole way, while the limbless grotesque