Chapter 323 — The Root-Tendril Monster Attacks
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Shen Mu was briefly taken aback. "A lot of girls bathing?
What kind of pleasure is there to be had in a desolate mountain wilderness like this. . .
wait.
I have run into girls bathing in a desolate wilderness before!
" A memory struck him all at once, and he could not help shuddering. He muttered, "It can't be that old monster, can it?
No, impossible.
It could never have survived so long in the ruins. I am simply being suspicious!
Still, to be safe, we had better take the long way around.
" Suddenly a voice rang out from behind them, clear and ringing: "Fellow Daoist, life is long, and where in it shall we not meet again? " Shen Mu turned and looked.
Yu Bochuan was leading a great host of True Heaven Palace adepts charging toward them, and fast. As those True Heaven Palace adepts raced along, they worked their arts, and one great tree after another tore itself up from the ground and became tree giants, striding forward at the same headlong run. At the same time the earth rumbled and shook, rocks flew, stones rolled swiftly onward and massed together into stone giants.
Even the hill beneath Shen Mu's feet was trembling, dirt sifting down with a rustle, and the boulders within it gathered higher and higher as a hill giant slowly climbed to its feet. "Looks like there is nothing for it but to fight our way through!
Let us hope it is not that old monster!
" Shen Mu gave the order, and the dragon qilin charged straight ahead. The hill beneath their feet had already risen; fire-clouds churned beneath the qilin's hooves as it ran along the arm of the hill giant.
The vast hill giant turned and swung its other arm down at them.
The dragon qilin sprang into the air, and behind it came a crash like the sky collapsing and the earth splitting apart: the hill giant's two arms had struck each other, and both snapped off, sending countless stones flying in all directions!
Shen Mu looked back.
The stones had no sooner struck the ground than they went rolling along with a rumble, as though they had grown legs of their own, tumbling ceaselessly back onto the hill giant's body, and before long the two arms had grown out again.
"Palace Master, the supreme arts of your True Heaven Palace are truly extraordinary! " Shen Mu praised from the bottom of his heart.
Xiong Xiyu marshalled her remaining dharma power, hooked a hand behind her and lifted; at once a shrill, wretched screaming rose from within the hill giant, and streaks of blue light flew out from the giant body formed of that hill, scattering into smoke and vanishing on the wind. The hill giant collapsed on the instant, its huge boulders rolling down until it was a hill once more.
"That spell is remarkable!
" Shen Mu's eyes lit up.
"Will you teach it to me? " Xiong Xiyu hesitated a moment, then nodded. "You are the benefactor of my daughter and me.
If you wish to learn it, of course I will pour out everything I have. " Shen Mu smiled. "I will not take it for nothing.
The True Heaven Palace is a holy land of the Western Lands, so I too will give you a cultivation method at the level of a holy land's foundational teaching in exchange. But first, let us leave this place! " The dragon qilin raced on, the two white bats circling round and round them, sending out sonic waves from time to time that knocked the True Heaven Palace masters pursuing them out of the air.
The bats urged, "Long Pang, hurry, hurry!
" "Be quiet! " the dragon qilin roared in fury.
"I am already going all out!
" Fire suddenly blazed fierce within its body; its flesh grew larger and larger, becoming a colossal beast over forty zhang long. Once it broke into a gallop it was like wind and lightning, and in a few breaths it had crossed the peaks ahead and arrived at the lake the white bats had spoken of, the one where so many girls were bathing.