Chapter 386 — The Evil Dragon That Locks the River
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
Shen Mu pondered a while, then activated the Moon Jade Eye. The jade eye slowly opened. Light kindled within the enormous eyeball, as though a full, round moon were hidden inside it.
Both the Sun-Shooting Divine Pupil and the Sun-Shooting Divine Cannon required treasures to supply them with energy, so Shen Mu had refined many pill furnaces to provide it.
Yet neither the Moon Jade Eye nor the Sun Jade Eye had any such structure, and he had pondered long over this without ever working out where the two sacred eyes drew their energy from. He had several bold conjectures. Perhaps the two jade eyes truly contained a sun and a moon, which supplied them with inexhaustible energy — but the conjecture was so bold that Shen Mu himself scarcely believed it.
The second conjecture was rather more plausible: that the humans or gods of high antiquity had mastered a strange formation capable of drawing energy from heaven and earth, from nature itself.
The flaw in this conjecture was that when Shen Mu activated the jade eye, he sensed no surge of unknown energy nearby. He had a third conjecture, and this one was rather far-fetched.
He guessed that the Moon Jade Eye and the Sun Jade Eye were in fact both treasures of the spatial-transport kind, but more complex than a teleportation formation — akin to a teleportation portal. Such a treasure would only need a vast portal established on the surface of the sun or the moon, and another portal within the jade eye; through these two portals the energy of the sun or moon would be gathered and released from the portal in the jade eye, producing the jade eye's terrifying destructive power without any need for a purpose-built energy-supplying treasure. The boldness of this conjecture lay in the question: who could fly to the sun or the moon? Moreover, by Shen Mu and his companions' calculations, the celestial phenomena were all false — the moon and the sun included — pasted on like paintings, and one could not leave this world at all.
How then could anyone go to the sun and moon to build teleportation portals? He dearly wanted to take the jade eye apart and see what lay within, but did not dare. At last the energy within the Moon Jade Eye finished gathering.
Shen Mu took control of it; the pupil of the jade eye turned vertical, and a thin blade of light shot forward! Lord Dragon-Rearer had already worked most of his neck free.
The blade of light sliced across his neck without any visible effect — yet where it passed, a wall of ice of unimaginable thinness suddenly appeared on the riverbed of the Yong, a wall of unknown length that split the riverbed in two! Many fish monsters and water monsters swam in the river.
Suddenly a large fish was cut in two by the ice wall, which was so thin it had almost no thickness at all. The fish monster seemed utterly unaware of it and kept swimming, though its body had parted down the middle, becoming two swimming halves of a fish, each with half a body. No blood flowed from its severed body — not only did no blood flow, one could clearly see its internal organs, even its brain tissue!
The two halves of the fish monster swam to and fro, not in the least aware that they had been cut in two. Shen Mu was dumbstruck, unable to understand what had happened. "Does this Moon Jade Eye have no power at all, only the ability to cut things apart? And why doesn't the thing die after being cut?
" Puzzled, he thought: "Could it be that these fish monsters' wounds are frozen, and that is why they do not bleed?
But the frozen place must be extremely thin, otherwise the fish monster could not still swim. " Suddenly blood began to seep from the swimming halves of the fish monster; the ice sealing the wound must have melted. The smell of blood spread, and the two halves were soon gnawed down to bare bone by a swarm of fish monsters.
Lord Dragon-Rearer, in the midst of molting, had long since stopped writhing and lay motionless, his eyeballs rolling this way and that.