Chapter 1152 — The Fatal Flaw
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 3
"The Fire Heavenly Venerable must know this weakness of his, and that is why he keeps so close to the Void Heavenly Venerable. He is not the hot-tempered man others suppose him to be; on the contrary, he is full of schemes."
Shen Mu thought, "Besides the Void Heavenly Venerable, there is also the You Heavenly Venerable. He seems to have quarreled with the You Heavenly Venerable. Could that be the reason?"
"In fact, Yin Tianzi could threaten him as well. His weakness is too great. Hide it as well as he may, traces will be left..."
Only when an outside enemy invaded the Southern Heaven, plunging it into disaster and chaos, leaving it powerless to resist, the people massacred, would the Fire Heavenly Venerable's crimes be revealed.
Only then would he be the sinner who dragged down the human race.
Only then would his ideals and convictions crumble and collapse, and only then would he realize his mistake. Before that, he remained ever the one who sheltered a region's people; despite all manner of bizarre doctrines, he had after all sheltered a region's people.
His merits and faults could not presently be seen by the people of the Southern Heaven. Even if the people of Jingping came to the Southern Heaven, not a few might well feel that only the Southern Heaven was a pure land among men.
If Shen Mu insisted that his crimes reached the heavens, he would only enrage the people of the Southern Heaven, and all would cry for his beating; no one would understand him.
To judge a man's merits and faults, his rights and wrongs, requires long years. Only when the dust of history settles does one know where the error lay.
Shen Mu calmed his mind and sought out a place in the Southern Heaven with clear mountains and waters. He visualized several houses and carefully studied the Ling Heavenly Venerable's manuscript.
These days, as he studied, many insights had come to him, only they were not yet systematic.
Dragon Qilin and Yan'er, rare to have settled down in peace, ran about everywhere in high spirits, and no one disturbed Shen Mu's quiet. He brought out the potted plant and set it on the table, then walked into the potted plant himself, arriving in the house within it.
The tea on the table was still warm. Shen Mu picked up the teacup. This tea had likely been left by Wei Suifeng. He sniffed it; the clear fragrance seeped into his belly.
Shen Mu drank his tea while he read.
The Ling Heavenly Venerable's manuscript dealt mostly with the Way of Creation, but it exhausted the principles of number and was exceedingly obscure and difficult to grasp.
Shen Mu was himself a master of the Way of Creation, yet reading the Ling Heavenly Venerable's manuscript still taxed him enormously. At times he needed to use a calculation divine weapon to madly compute before he could understand the meaning of the words.
"No wonder the Heavenly Court obtained the Ling Heavenly Venerable's manuscript forty thousand years ago and still never cracked its contents. Even if this manuscript were taken to the Dao Ancestor to see, the Dao Ancestor might not necessarily make sense of it."
Shen Mu could not help but marvel. The knowledge touched upon in the Ling Heavenly Venerable's manuscript was exceedingly vast; much of it had already left the scope of divination arts, and divination arts could not answer it.
And when it came to the later contents of her manuscript, her comprehension had left the Way of Creation behind and reached another realm: no birth, no aging, no death, no illness, no disaster, no pain.
She had comprehended that all changes are the changes of matter; a person's birth, aging, sickness, and death are changes brought about by the alteration of matter, and a person becoming a deity is likewise matter changing.
Shen Mu even felt that nearly all ancient gods were composed of matter, and so long as matter existed, the Ling Heavenly Venerable's divine ability could restrain them.