Chapter 852 — From This Day, Forever Parted from You

The ground rolled like boiling soup, and the colossus beneath it burst suddenly up through the soil; its body was so vast that the distant mountain ranges toppled like trees caught in a hurricane. Shen Mu stood upon the Dragon Qilin's head.

The Dragon Qilin was racing at tremendous speed, swift beyond measure, and yet the gale raised by that colossus as it surged up out of the earth still battered them, so that he could barely keep his footing. That unimaginably thick body was only some dozens of zhang from them; seen from afar, it seemed to graze past them.

It was a body overgrown with wooden scales, like the roots and tendrils of a tree, and yet the wood-scales were studded with every kind of natural rune-mark and even gave off a metallic sheen.

The body was immense; though it was wood, it was exceedingly nimble, and as it burst up from the earth Shen Mu saw its secondary roots unfold like so many dragon claws, keen and sinewy. Only, this body had far too many of those dragon claws, several hundred at the least!

And upon its body grew countless root-tendrils, like a dragon's whiskers and beard; the tendrils on its back were like a dragon's mane, very long and flowing! Because its speed was so great, lightning flashed and thunder rolled on every side; the bolts did not strike down at the ground but lashed outward in all directions from that monster as their center, forming thick layers of discharge.

Lightning flew in every direction, sizzling, and when the current passed through the bodies of Shen Mu and the Dragon Qilin, even though the two of them drove the Ancestral Dragon's Grand Mystery Art at once to shed the thunder's force, their bodies were still punched full of fine holes by it!

"Master, medicine!

" cried the Dragon Qilin in a panic. "There are places I can't reach to lick!

" Shen Mu steadied himself, his flesh healing at flying speed, and reached out to take several dozen bottles of dragon saliva, smashing them open and letting the saliva run into the Dragon Qilin's wounds. He looked up, and the head of that immense body had already appeared among the clouds; the cloud vapor around it was pushed aside, and the head spat out stream after stream of breath, thick smoke rolling, and within the smoke, firelight.

The breath it spat came so fast that the air itself burned.

Yet the breath it spat was also utterly foul, carrying the stench of things rotted and buried underground; hence the smoke spread everywhere.

This was an earth dragon, and its frame was truly immense.

Other divine dragons had but sparse whiskers, while its whiskers were root-tendrils, densely crowding out from all around its mouth, and very long, drifting and swaying like a hanging curtain. In the instant this earth dragon bored its way out, it opened its mouth and bit at the Blind Old Man and Qu He, who were in the midst of battle: with a crunch, a whole piece of the sky was gone, and even the Heaven Diagram that shrouded Jingping had a great chunk bitten out of it!

The Blind Old Man and Qu He dodged at flying speed, escaping from its mouth by the narrowest of margins, and landed upon the enormous head of this earth dragon.

Two divinities raced across its colossal skull, and as they ran they dealt one another lethal blows.

The Blind Old Man's Longtuo Divine Spear turned into a black dragon; the spear thrust, the spear withdrawn, swift beyond compare; the Longtuo swam, and under the Blind Old Man's command it was nimble in the extreme, striking precisely at the nodes of Qu He's divine-power force and breaking apart his formations. Qu He's mode of attack was another matter.

Though he pressed in step by step, his offense was no close combat; rather, a thousand arms whirled and flew, and from the holy pupils in his palms shot beam after beam of light, and the beams collided in midair, rebounded, and wove themselves into nets. Thus each of his strikes was a formation, and each formation differed from the last; he used formations as divine powers, and the sight was dazzling to the eye.

Formations: to lay a formation in advance, few could use formations directly as divine powers in battle, unless one had forged a set of formation primal weapons or divine weapons. Take He Yiyi, formation master of the Western Lands: her path was the path of formations, using square stones as the basic elements that composed a formation and the arts of number to construct it.

The square stones were her primal weapons. Were she to use formations as divine powers, she could not do it.

But Qu He was heaven-gifted. His arms were exceedingly many, and in the palm of every hand grew an eye; he had refined his thousand eyes into holy pupils, and within the holy pupils he hid formations.

When a formation activated, the rays it shot were not simple power but woven from countless formation-patterns; when the rays collided, the various intricate patterns joined one another in the collision, and so spread out into formation arrays and formed all manner of formations.

Of course, the might of such formations could not match killing formations constructed from primal weapons or divine weapons, yet they could be freely combined, changing in an instant, leaving no time for anyone to break them.

To take formations as one's main path of cultivation made advancement arduous, yet one's fighting strength surpassed those who cultivated other arts; this too was why Celestial Master Zixi had beaten the Martial Celestial Master until he was utterly convinced.

Qu He was such a man.

Yet what he had met was the most renowned holy pupil and formation master in all Jingping.

The Blind Old Man's attainments in formations had originally been exceedingly high; in his early years, because Xing'an had gouged out a pair of his holy pupils, his will had sunk so low that he hid himself away in the Barren Ruins, and afterward, because Shen Mu walked out of the Barren Ruins, and it happened to coincide with the Jingping Reforms. He absorbed the fruits of the Jingping Reforms and also studied the formation attainments of the Kaihuang era, and in formations his attainments were already those of the very foremost figure.

Though the Blind Old Man had not achieved what Qu He had, formations as divine power, yet he broke formations with his divine spear, which precisely restrained Qu He's formation divine powers, so that their might could not be brought into play in time. To break the strong with the weak was in itself the means a formation master prided himself on.

When two formation masters met, whose cultivation was deeper was no longer the key to victory; the key to victory lay in whose attainments were higher. The two men raced across the earth dragon's back, the might of their various divine powers and techniques sweeping out on every side, and yet in the next moment both met peril at once.

That earth dragon had been startled by Shen Mu's heavenly-fire divine power, yet it did not seek out Shen Mu, for Shen Mu was comparatively weak, and the two divinities battling in the air were its targets; hence it struck at the two of them first. The earth dragon bit at empty air, and the two had already fought their way onto its head; at once the earth dragon shook its skull, and from beneath the wooden-scaled skin countless root-tendrils bored out and wound toward the two.

Those tendrils were like so many earth-yellow flood-dragons, exceedingly hard, and they pierced through their divine powers without the slightest obstruction.

The Blind Old Man was startled. He lifted his spear and thrust at one tendril, a stroke of genius, exquisite to the last hair, skilled at breaking force; yet when it struck that flood-dragon-like tendril, there came a hollow thunk. The Longtuo Divine Spear sank only five inches into the dragon head; it did not pierce the tendril through.

"Hard as that!