荒墟牧神 - 第33章 劍丹破空鳴 - 錦書坊

startled; he slapped his forehead—he had just forgotten that this was a sword core forged from thousands of swords gathered into one. With thousands of swords combined, how heavy must the weight be? Caught off guard, Shen Mu's arm was of course dislocated by the weight, and he lay flat on the ground. Silent Smith was just about to set Shen Mu's arm back in its socket when Granny Zhu, striding over, kicked him clear out of the village with one foot; where he landed, no one knew. Only his "ah, ah" came drifting from the air beyond the village, fainter and fainter. Granny Zhu, her face dark, set Shen Mu's arm for him and said angrily: "Anyone who cannot speak is a bad seed, full of wickedness! Shen'er, these swords are mother-and-son swords. Among the thousands, one is the mother sword and the rest are the son swords. If you find the mother sword, you can call all the sons back. But the Lanjiang Sect's sword core is terribly heavy—you still cannot lift it." She picked up a sword and gave it a light shake, just as Silent Smith had done, and thousands of precious swords came flying with a great clatter, merging into this mother sword. Granny Zhu said with a smile: "To turn the mother sword back into a sword core, you do not need to rub it—Silent Smith was playing tricks on you. You need only merge your primal qi with the mother sword, and it will shrink back into a sword core. In the same way, by this method you can also send out the son swords from the mother sword." Shen Mu studied the sword core in her palm, blinked, and said doubtfully: "Granny, there seem to be silver pellets like this in your room—lots of them!" "Are there?" Granny Zhu blinked her dim old eyes and said doubtfully. "There are!" Shen Mu remembered: he had seen such silver pellets in Granny Zhu's room, and not a few of them—some tossed under the bed, some in shoes no longer worn, and plenty more in the corners. When he was small, he had even used these silver pellets as marbles, flicking them back and forth. He had even seen the old hen Granny Zhu kept swallow such silver pellets as though they were grit and stones! It was terrifying to think of now—if one of those silver pellets had suddenly gone "pfft" inside the old hen's belly and turned into a sword, what a gruesome scene it would have made. Fortunately, no such thing had happened. Granny Zhu's eyes flickered, and she said: "If you could lift them when you were little, then they were ordinary silver pellets, not sword cores." Shen Mu did not quite believe her: "I also saw a big chest in Grandpa Silent Smith's smithy, and it was packed full of these silver pellets." Granny Zhu's dim old eyes blinked and blinked, blinking more smoothly than Shen Mu's, and she said with a smile: "Do you think Silent Smith could be that rich?" Shen Mu was rather bewildered by her words. Silent Smith certainly did not look like a man of such wealth and power; he was plainly just a poor wretch who did nothing but hammer iron and sweat. Granny Zhu laughed: "Don't think too much. Everyone in our village is an ordinary person—every last one of us a poor wretch with not a coin to jingle, and all of us old cripples besides. We are just a plain, ordinary village; everything is perfectly normal. If you are going to suspect that chest of Silent Smith's is full of sword cores, you might as well suspect the water vat in the corner is a treasure!" Shen Mu looked at the water vat she meant. It stood under the eaves of the smithy, used to catch rainwater when it rained. But what was strange was that Shen Mu had never seen this vat full; no matter how heavy the rain, it always held half a vat of water! And moreover, the water in this vat had never grown less, nor had its bottom ever been seen. Silent Smith used a great deal of water for his forging, dipping it out bucket after bucket, yet the water in the vat remained just as much as ever! Granny Zhu saw the little look of doubt in his eyes and felt this example had been somewhat ill-chosen, s