荒墟牧神 - 雷音古剎驚塵世 - 書海閣

se vital essence, but merely a part of it. For the tortoise and the serpent together form the Black Tortoise; her spirit embryo should be a serpent, without the tortoise—a branch of the greater Black Tortoise spirit-body lineage. Hence her body movement, too, was uncanny and unfathomable. Shen Mu blocked her bizarre attacks with the Thousand-Armed Vajra. Uncanny as her movement was, Shen Mu seemed to have grown a thousand arms—hands everywhere, before and behind. In a short span she took several hundred punches and was beaten unconscious. And Old Man Ma had, in the meantime, smoothly sold a stretcher. It was the first time Shen Mu had encountered such uncanny body movement; he had taken a few wounds, though fortunately none serious. On the platform, the fighting continued. Meanwhile, at the Blind Old Man's fortune-telling stall, many people had come to wager on who would win and who would lose. The Desolate City had no unified currency; all trade was barter—if the value seemed about right, an exchange was made. Betting worked the same way. Jade, ores, jewels, cattle, sheep—people simply staked them outright. Behind the Blind Old Man, a pile of goods had already accumulated, containing all manner of things, including an old hen with five-colored feathers, taller than a man, its beak full of sharp fangs. It looked quite ferocious; when it flapped its wings, smoke and dust billowed from beneath them, and sand flew out like a rain of arrows, thudding in every direction! This was a hen-dragon—not an ordinary old hen, but the offspring of a dragon and a chicken. Though the dragon blood within its body was scant, the eggs it laid were a treasure. "In the next match, this monk wagers on my disciple's victory!" Suddenly a Buddhist invocation rang out. An old monk pushed his way to the fortune-telling stall, set his staff down on the table with a clatter, and pressed the table legs deep into the earth. He sat down across from the Blind Old Man, pressed his palms together, and said, "This is my stake! Who will wager against this monk?" The Blind Old Man's heart tightened in awe. "The Great Thunderclap Temple?" he said. "The Great Thunderclap Temple," the old monk answered. The Blind Old Man turned his head, looked at Old Man Ma, and said, "Old Ma, your turn." Old Man Ma set down the crutches in his hands and sat down across from the old monk. The old monk raised his head, looked at Old Man Ma, and said without expression, "Junior brother." Old Man Ma said without expression, "Senior brother." "You passed on the divine arts of our Great Thunderclap Temple to outsiders, breaking our temple's rules." The old monk's white brows hung long as he said in a low voice, "In those days, you cut off one of your own arms and sent it to the temple, saying you were returning the Great Thunderclap Temple's divine arts to the Great Thunderclap Temple. Your arm is still preserved in the Thousand Buddha Pagoda to this day. Now, however, you have passed on our Great Thunderclap Temple's divine arts to an outsider—to that boy on the platform. You have gone back on your word."