If Lord Dragon-Rearer had hidden the True Dragon Nest anywhere else, Shen Mu would not have gone so far as to praise him for cunning. In Hidden Remnant Village, after all, cunning was the highest of compliments. To hide the True Dragon Nest on his own body, or on the body of the Flood Dragon King God, was the thinking of an ordinary man, and would only have made the target easier to find. But Lord Dragon-Rearer had hidden it on the utterly unremarkable black flood dragon, making the creature swallow it into its belly — that was a habit of thought no ordinary human would ever adopt, and it deserved praise. So he did not stint his admiration. Lord Dragon-Rearer paid him no heed, shedding his skin in one sustained effort, straining to push himself out of it. Once he shed those two layers of hide, he could finish Shen Mu off and take back the True Dragon Nest and the True Dragon Lord. Shen Mu stroked the black flood dragon on his shoulder. It nuzzled obediently under his palm, and a sound like an infant's came from its mouth: "Maha!" Shen Mu roused the Dragon-Riding Art, forged a link with the black flood dragon, passed it the Carefree Sword, and tried to command it to cut Lord Dragon-Rearer down. But the black flood dragon did not dare truly raise a hand against Lord Dragon-Rearer, and actually broke free of his mental control. The black flood dragon had not merely been raised by Lord Dragon-Rearer; it also held an instinctive terror of him, and dared not strike at him. Yet with Shen Mu's strength alone, even holding a divine sword, he could not inflict a fatal wound on Lord Dragon-Rearer — at most he could pierce his hide and flesh. Lord Dragon-Rearer's injuries were grave, mortal in fact. The Blind Elder's blow had done him too much damage, and Shen Mu had personally fed him poison besides; only two moltings could erase such wounds, and even a successful molting would cost him dearly in vital essence. "My Triple-Break Powder is used up, and there's no time to refine more poison. Fat Dragon may be at the Heaven-Man realm, but whether he can wield the Carefree Sword well enough to slay Lord Dragon-Rearer is doubtful... Perhaps I should test the power of the Sun Jade Eye..." At this thought he meant to take out the Sun Jade Eye, but on second thought changed his mind and drew the Moon Jade Eye from the Taotie Pouch instead. This was the Yong River, its waters fierce; the Sun Jade Eye spewed incomparably intense firelight, and clashing with the water would surely blunt its power. As for the Moon Jade Eye, he had never yet tested its might, but the Moon Jade Eye did not fear water, and could unleash its full power at the bottom of a river. Shen Mu went to Lord Dragon-Rearer's neck and set the enormous eyeball down. Lord Dragon-Rearer ignored him and kept struggling to molt. Shen Mu adjusted the Moon Jade Eye's position, aimed it at Lord Dragon-Rearer's neck, and made some fine adjustments. This was the first time he had ever used the Moon Jade Eye. The Sun Jade Eye he had tried before; its power was tremendous — it had sliced the Qushan Shrine clean open and destroyed that undersea space. When he designed the Sun-Shooting Divine Cannon for Emperor Yanfeng, he had also studied the Sun Jade Eye's structure and absorbed many of its forging principles. After all, what the Imperial Preceptor of Jingping had given him was only the cultivation method for the Sun-Shooting Divine Pupil, with no record of how to design the cannon. Only by drawing on certain structural features of the Sun Jade Eye had Shen Mu been able to turn the Sun-Shooting Divine Pupil into the Sun-Shooting Divine Cannon. And he surmised that the Qushan Shrine might come from some age before the Kaihuang era, for many of the runic marks upon it differed greatly from those of both the present day and the Kaihuang era. 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. He too had seen what became of that fish monster, and felt a chill of dread. Shen Mu adjusted the jade eye and cut another fish monster down the middle. That one too was divided in tw