The village was a morass of water, a ground strewn with sharp swords, so that there was hardly a place to set foot, and the corpses lying here and there lent the scene a weird, ghastly horror. The village head surveyed his surroundings, frowned, and said, "Lame Elder, go and tidy this up — lay them out decently in coffins, don't leave them exposed in the wild; send them down the river. Burn paper ingots, candles, paper boats, and paper cranes for them too." The Lame Elder hobbled forward, threw a glance at the Blind Elder, and said with a grin, "Sentimental old sod — still spouting verse, and a load of rubbish at that!" The Blind Elder flew into a rage, his whiskers blowing upward at the corners of his mouth: "You'd spout verse too if you could, but you don't know more than a few characters!" Granny Zhu put in hastily, "Lame Elder, when you lay them out, keep the good stuff on the side — don't put it in the coffins! It's worth a bit of money; next time we can sell it for oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar!" "Right!" In the Wastes, the dearest things were not gold, silver, or jewels but oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and silks and brocades. Such goods did not exist in the Wastes; only caravans could bring them from the outside world to Jianglong City, and the folk of the Wastes had to barter rare treasures and beast hides for them — it was no exaggeration to say that salt was worth more than gold. Every time, Granny Zhu hauled a cartload of treasures and drove several beasts of burden to Jianglong City; only by selling the beasts and treasures could she trade for a little oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar. The Medicine Master came forward to apply medicine and bandage the wounds on Shen Mu's hands, shaking his head: "Catching a sword with bare hands — your primordial energy is nowhere near strong enough. Don't play the hero next time." Shen Mu felt only a cool, tingling numbness in his palms, no pain. "My sword-control art isn't good enough," he said. "I can't match the agility of that man from the Lan River Sect. I can feel a body full of strength, but I just can't strike it out." "That's only natural. That Butcher's sword-control art is far too poor; there's nothing he can teach you." The Medicine Master added with a knowing smile: "There's someone in this village who knows deep and subtle sword-control, only he doesn't want to teach you." The village head's expression darkened slightly, and he said stiffly, "Medicine Master, there's too much water here — take me back to my room!" The Medicine Master laughed: "Then the village head will have to wait a moment; I'm still bandaging Mu'er's hands." When the wounds were bound, Shen Mu saw the mute blacksmith picking up swords from the ground. He picked one up and shook it gently, and at once flying swords by the thousand came of their own accord, clanging and clattering against the sword in his hand; then all of them vanished, merged into a single sword. Shen Mu could not help clicking his tongue in wonder. He went up too, picked up a sword, and shook it gently — but nothing happened at all. The mute grinned wide; there was no tongue in his mouth. He made two "ah-ah" sounds, then rubbed the sword between his two hands, and the sword was rubbed smaller and smaller until, in the blink of an eye, it had become a tiny silver pellet no bigger than a fingertip. Shen Mu looked at the sword in his own hand and thought he should rub it too, to see whether he could work it into a silver pellet. The Medicine Master quickly said, "Don't rub! I only just bandaged those wounds! Mute, stop teasing him, or I'll poison you to death!" The mute laughed without stopping, snatched the flying sword from Shen Mu's hand, and pressed the silver pellet into his palm instead. Crack. Shen Mu heard a light sound from his shoulder, and then the pellet in his hand pressed his whole body down, flattening him to the ground. The mute gave a start and slapped his forehead — he had just forgotten that this was the Myriad-Blade Sword Soul, refined from several thousand swords fused together. When several thousand swords are added together, how immense must their weight be? Taken entirely unawares, Shen Mu had his arm pulled out of joint and lay sprawled flat. The mute was just about to set his arm back in place when Granny Zhu, walking over, kicked him clean out of the village, no one knew where; from beyond the village there came only the sound of "ah — ah," growing fainter and fainter. With a dark face, Granny Zhu fitted Shen Mu's arm back into its socket and said angrily: "All those who can't speak are bad seeds — full of nothing but dirty tricks! Mu'er, these swords are mother-and-child swords: among several thousand swords, one is the mother and all the rest are children. As long as you find the mother sword, you can call back every child sword. But the Lan River Sect's Myriad-Blade Sword Soul is frightfully heavy; you can't lift it yet." She picked up a sword and shook it lightly just as the mute had done, and several thousand swords came clattering through the air, merging into that mother sword. Granny Zhu said: "To turn the mother sword back into the Myriad-Blade Sword Soul, there's no need to rub it — the mute was playing tricks on you. You only need to merge your primordial energy with the mother sword, and it will shrink back into the Myriad-Blade Sword Soul. And by the same method, you can release the child swords from within the mother sword." Shen Mu studied the Myriad-Blade Sword Soul in her palm, blinked, and asked in puzzlement: "Grandma, there are silver pellets like this in your room — lots of them!" "Are there?" Granny Zhu blinked her dim old eyes, puzzled. "There are!" Shen Mu remembered: he had seen such silver pellets in Granny Zhu's room, in no small number — some tossed under the bed, some inside shoes not worn, and a good many more in the corners. When he was little, he had even used those silver pellets as marbles, flicking them back and forth. He had even seen the old hen Granny Zhu raised swallow those silver pellets as if they were grit! To think of it now was truly frightful — if one of those pellets had suddenly gone "pfft" inside the hen's stomach and turned into a sword, the sight would have been horrific. Fortunately, such a thing had never happened. Granny Zhu's eyes flickered: "When you were little you could pick them up, so of course they were ordinary silver pellets, not Myriad-Blade Sword Souls." Shen Mu was not entirely convinced: "I also saw, in Grandpa Mute's smithy, a big chest packed full of such pellets." Granny Zhu blinked her dim old eyes, blinking even more briskly than Shen Mu, and said with a smile: "Do you think the mute could be that rich?" Shen Mu was a little bewildered — indeed, the mute did not look like a man of great wealth; plainly he was a poor drudge good only for swinging his hammer at the forge. Granny Zhu said: "Don't overthink it. Everyone in our village is ordinary folk — poor as church mice, every one, and old cripples besides. We're just an ordinary village; everything is perfectly normal. If you're going to suspect that chest of the mute's is full of Myriad-Blade Sword Souls, you might as well suspect the water vat by the wall is a treasure too!" Shen Mu looked at the vat she spoke of. It sat under the eaves of the smithy, there to catch rainwater when it rained; but the strange thing was that Shen Mu had never seen it full — no matter how heavy the rain, it always held half a vat of water! And the water had never lessened, never run dry. The mute used a great deal of water for his forging, scooping it out bucket after bucket, yet the vat still held just as much as ever! Seeing the suspicion in his eyes, Granny Zhu also felt that example was not quite right, and hurried on: "You don't think that heap of broken pots at the Medicine Master's door is a treasure too, do you?" Shen Mu looked at the broken pots before the Medicine Master's door. Inside the pots were some unkn