Chapter 36 — The Ancient Thunder-Sound Temple Startles the Mortal World
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 3
Her vital essence was uncanny, turning into a great serpent coiled about her whole body. Such essence was not the pure Black Tortoise essence but only a part of it.
The tortoise and the serpent make the Black Tortoise. Her spirit fetus must be the serpent, without the tortoise—a branch of the great clan of Black Tortoise spirit bodies—and so her movement arts were uncanny and unfathomable.
Shen Mu blocked her uncanny attacks with the Thousand-Armed Vajra. Uncanny though her movements were, Shen Mu seemed to have grown a thousand arms, hands everywhere before and behind him; in but a short while she had taken hundreds of blows and was beaten unconscious.
And Huo Ye smoothly sold a stretcher.
For the first time Shen Mu had met so uncanny a movement art, and he took some hurt as well, though happily not serious.
On the platform the fighting went on, and at the Blind Elder's fortune-telling stall many came to bet on who would win and who would lose. In the Desolate Ruins there was no common currency; all trade was by barter, exchanged when the value seemed about equal, and so were the bets—jade, ore, jewels, cattle and sheep, all staked outright.
Behind the Blind Elder a pile of goods had already heaped up, things of every kind, and a mother hen as well, of five-colored feathers, as tall as a man, its beak full of sharp fangs, fierce to look upon; it flapped its wings and beneath them dust rose on every side, sand shooting out like a rain of arrows!
This was a Plume-crested Fire Pheasant Dragon—no ordinary mother hen but the offspring of dragon and fowl. Though it had little dragon blood in its veins, the eggs it laid were a treasure.
"For the next bout, this monk wagers that his disciple wins."
Suddenly a Buddhist invocation came, and a white-browed monk squeezed his way to the fortune-telling stall, and with a clatter laid his staff upon the table, pressing the table's legs into the earth. The white-browed monk sat facing the Blind Elder, joined his palms, and said: "This is the stake! Who will wager against this monk?"
The Blind Elder was stricken inwardly and spoke: "The Great Thunder-Sound Temple?"
The white-browed monk said: "The Great Thunder-Sound Temple."
The Blind Elder turned his head, looked at Huo Ye, and said: "Old Ma, you come."
Huo Ye set down the crutches in his hand and sat facing the white-browed monk. The monk raised his head to look at Huo Ye and said without expression: "Junior brother."
Huo Ye said without expression: "Senior brother."
"You have spread abroad the divine arts of our Great Thunder-Sound Temple, and broken the rules of our Great Thunder-Sound Temple."
The white-browed monk's long white brows hung down; he said in a low voice: "In that year you cut off one of your own arms and sent it to the temple, saying that you returned the divine arts of the Great Thunder-Sound Temple to the Great Thunder-Sound Temple; your arm is still kept in the Myriad Forms Pagoda. And now you have spread abroad the divine arts of our Great Thunder-Sound Temple, given them to that youth on the platform—breaking your word."