Chapter 7 — A Wall at the Brow Seals the Spirit Fetus
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 3
The Demon Ape's palm had injured his organs and bones, but under the scouring of his essence, the cracks in both were steadily mending. Senior Brother Chu and the others thought he relied on some superior medicine; it never occurred to them that he relied on that unreliable Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art.
Gradually Shen Mu discovered a place in his body—a patch of fascia between bone and skin—that his essence could not reach. That place was the space between his brows.
A spot between his eyebrows, no more than a finger's width. His essence could not reach this place.
It could scour beneath the scalp and strengthen the skull, but whenever it came to the space between his brows it met with tremendous obstruction, as though an invisible wall stood across the way, barring his essence's path. And when he drove his essence against that invisible wall, something even stranger happened: he heard a mysterious sound.
The sound seemed to come from beyond the ninth heaven, high and distant, rising and falling, melodious and sacred, like a god enthroned on high proclaiming a divine decree. And whenever the sound rang out, his essence slipped beyond his control, receding like the tide and flowing around the space between his brows.
"Could this be the Spirit Fetus Wall?
" Shen Mu was puzzled. The village headman and Granny Zhu had spoken to him of "walls" and "breaking walls.
" A wall was a seal upon one of the body's many treasuries; to break a wall was to open the seal and take the treasure within.
But the headman and Granny Zhu had never told him where in the human body the Spirit Fetus Wall lay, nor how to open it. What Shen Mu did not know was that it was not that the headman and Granny Zhu were unwilling to tell him—it was that no method or art for breaking the Spirit Fetus Wall existed in this world at all! Ordinary people and spirit bodies were two different orders of being, two different castes.
Being a spirit body, one's Spirit Fetus Wall was open from birth, and one was born a cut above. For ordinary people the Spirit Fetus Wall was sealed, and they were a cut below.
Those lofty spirit bodies rarely troubled themselves with the needs of ordinary folk. Among ordinary people, martial artists were rare; as for an ordinary person who had opened the Spirit Fetus Wall, even the headman and Granny Zhu had never heard of such a thing, and so of course they did not know how to break it.
As Shen Mu ran, he urged his essence again and again against the invisible wall between his brows.
The mysterious sound kept ringing out, making his essence retreat of its own accord.
Though he failed to break the wall each time, he had patience to spare, and he firmly believed that sooner or later he would succeed. He did not intend to tell the headman and the others of what he had discovered today about the Mystic Body Three Elixirs Art.
He meant to wait until he had broken the wall, and then give them a surprise. Whether, for the headman and the rest, it would prove more a surprise or a shock—that was hard to say.
The harder Senior Brother Chu and his four companions chased, the more anxious they grew. Ahead of them, the "little wretch" was not merely healing—his speed had actually increased beyond what it once was!
That was terrifying.
It meant that Shen Mu's cultivation was growing even as he fled! Slow as the growth was, it was already frightening enough!
Everyone cultivated step by step. Even after breaking a wall, one's cultivation advanced by gradual degrees—no one could grow fat on a single mouthful.
Who among them had not trained ten days, months, even years without letup before their cultivation showed any progress? Yet this "little wretch," even as he fled, showed a cultivation that was visibly rising. That was truly terrifying!
Fortunately, Shen Mu had been weaker than them to begin with, and though he was rising now, a gap still remained between him and them. Still, catching him was no easy matter.