Chapter 33 — The Sword Core Shrieks Through the Air

The village was flooded everywhere with water and strewn everywhere with sharp swords; there was scarcely room to set a foot, and the corpses, laid out one after another, gave off an eerie and hideous feeling. The village head looked around, frowned, and spoke: "Lame Elder, go and tidy things up and lay them properly in their coffins. Don't leave them to lie exposed in the wilderness—send them down the river. Burn paper ingots, candles, paper boats and paper cranes for them as well." The Lame Elder limped forward, shot a glance at the Blind Elder, and chuckled: "So sentimental, and still chanting poetry—chanting such utter nonsense." The Blind Elder flew into a rage, the whiskers at the corners of his mouth blowing upward: "As if you could chant if you wanted to—you can't read more than a few characters!" Granny Zhu said hastily: "Lame Elder, when you lay them out, keep the good things! Don't put them into the coffins. They're worth something, after all—next time we can sell them for a bit of oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar!" "Right you are!" In the Desolate Ruins, the most precious things were not gold, silver or jewels, but oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, fine silks and brocades. Such things did not exist in the Ruins; only caravans could bring them from the outside world to Jianglong City, where the inhabitants of the Ruins bartered rare treasures and animal hides for them. One might well say that salt was dearer than gold. Every time, Granny Zhu would haul a cartload of treasures and drive a few head of livestock to Jianglong City, and only by selling the beasts and the treasures could she trade for a little oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar. The Pill Master came forward, applied medicine to Shen Mu and bound the wounds on his hands, shaking his head: "Catching swords bare-handed—your primal qi is not yet strong enough for that. Don't show off next time." Shen Mu felt only a cool numbness in his palms, with no pain at all, and said: "My sword-controlling art is no good. I cannot be as nimble as that man from the Lanjiang Sect. I feel as though I have a whole body's worth of strength, yet I cannot strike it out." "That is only natural. That fellow the Butcher is too poor at the sword-controlling art to teach you anything." The Pill Master said with a smile: "There is someone in our village who knows a profound sword-controlling art—a pity he does not wish to teach you." The village head's face darkened slightly, and he said stiffly: "Pill Master, there is too much water here. Take me back to my room!" The Pill Master laughed: "Then the village head will have to wait a moment. I am still bandaging Shen'er's wounds." When the bandaging was done, Shen Mu saw the smith, Silent Smith, picking up swords from the ground. He picked one up, gave it a light shake, and at once thousands upon thousands of flying swords came flying of their own accord, clashing with a jingling clang against the sword in his hand; and these swords all vanished, merging into a single blade, which made Shen Mu click his tongue in wonder. He too stepped forward, picked up a sword and gave it a light shake—but nothing happened at all. Silent Smith grinned, his mouth tongueless; he uttered two sounds, "ah, ah," then rubbed the sword between his two hands, and the blade shrank smaller and smaller under his rubbing until, in the blink of an eye, it became a tiny silver pellet no bigger than a fingertip. Shen Mu looked at the sword in his own hand and wanted to rub it too, to see whether he could rub it into a little silver pellet, but the Pill Master said hurriedly: "Don't rub it! The wound was just bandaged! Silent Smith, stop teasing him, or I'll poison you!" Silent Smith laughed without stopping, snatched the flying sword from Shen Mu's hand, and then pressed the silver pellet into Shen Mu's hand. Crack. Shen Mu heard a faint sound from his own shoulder, and then his whole body was pressed flat to the ground by the silver pellet in his hand. Silent Smith was 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