荒墟牧神 - 第23章 荒村少年觸神威 - 錦書坊

Shen Mu was shaken to the core: "Carrying a stone idol on your back is the same as carrying a god on your back?" The Blind Elder said flatly, "To walk with a god on your back is a weight beyond all measure. Back then, when Granny Zhu and the others set out to save you, Old Huo carried a stone idol on his back and brought the old woman all the way to the riverbank. For a stretch of road that short, even a man of Old Huo's strength was nearly broken by the burden." Shen Mu's scalp went numb. Were the stone idols in this village really so heavy? Then who had carved these idols? And what god was carved upon them? Why should carving them in that likeness make them so heavy? When he was small he had climbed onto the idols to shit and piss—would the gods resent him for it? "Set your mind at ease. The god who carved these idols died long ago. Shen'er, the reason I have you look at the idols is to temper your eyes. What I have you look at is no ordinary stone idol, but an image that a god made for a god!" The Blind Elder's voice was loud enough to set his eardrums ringing, and he bellowed at a bamboo basket beside the idol: "Shen'er, the Nine Heavens Eye-Gazing Art opens the Sacred Pupil, and a Sacred Pupil must needs behold the gods! Behold them with your eyes—behold the god's momentum, the god's cadence, the god's breath, the god's bearing, the god's divinity!" Shen Mu's heart and spirit quaked: "Behold the gods? Behold the god within the stone idol?" "Let your vital essence enter your eyes, and open the first heaven of your mortal, fleshly eyes!" The Blind Elder's bamboo staff tapped lightly at Shen Mu's solar plexus—but this time it struck with uncanny precision, and at once Shen Mu felt his vital essence surge and come rushing toward his eyes! To temper the eyes is a perilous thing. Shen Mu's vital essence had already begun to refine his body, burning away its impurities and its excess fat, but the eyes are the hardest place of all to refine—a forbidden ground, one might almost say. A single misstep and a man goes blind! Shen Mu had once asked the village headman how one refines the eyes, but the headman had not said much, only that one should not lightly attempt to temper them. Yet here was the Blind Elder driving Shen Mu's vital essence at his eyes, fierce and overbearing, against all reason! Shen Mu felt a drilling pain in both eyes as his vital essence poured in a mighty flood into them. His cultivation of vital essence was exceedingly deep, yet under the Blind Elder's terrifying power it was pressed thin as a thread. How big are a man's eyes? But in that moment Shen Mu felt his eyes were vast beyond measure, vast as the heavens! His vital essence was a dragon, and that enormous dragon entered eyes as vast as the sky, and then abruptly burst forth; the vital essence surged up into the heavens like a pillar propping up the sky, and then rolled across the vault of heaven, forming strange and uncanny patterns upon the firmament, woven into a net, like the warp and weft of the Way of Heaven, filling the sky. The pain of a moment before vanished as suddenly as it had come, replaced by a comfort beyond all words, a comfort he had never known. "Shen'er, remember the patterns in the sky. That is the first heaven of the Nine Heavens Eye-Gazing Art—the Shenxiao Heaven Tiangang Array Patterns." The Blind Elder's voice came from beyond the heavens, remote and high. Shen Mu hurried to commit it to memory. His vital essence, driven by the Blind Elder, arranged itself within his eyes into the Shenxiao Heaven Tiangang Array Patterns; he could see with perfect clarity the course of those patterns, their structure, their every detail—but the Tiangang array patterns were so intricate and manifold that memorizing them took time. Again and again the Blind Elder drove his vital essence; after a long while, when Shen Mu's vital essence was all but spent, he at last drew the bamboo staff away from Shen Mu's solar plexus. "How much did you memorize?"