荒墟牧神 - 第13章 木棍百擊斷生機 - 錦書坊

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