Chapter 455 — The Array Master of the Western Frontier
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
The dragon-qilin, frantic with alarm, craned its neck this way and that, dreading that these towers, houses, and palaces might come alive once more.
All was silence in Yun City; not another soul was to be seen anywhere in the city. On the geographical charts of the Western Land, Yun City was marked as a great city of more than a hundred thousand souls, yet now its inhabitants had vanished utterly.
Whoever could make a whole city abandon its homeland must wield a power beyond imagining.
Yun City stood hollow and bare, with only Shen Mu and his companions within it; the city that had been so vividly alive a moment ago seemed now to have died all at once.
The deeper the quiet, the more dreadful it became.
Suddenly the entire city began to quake violently; the earth beneath their feet heaved and churned, and one tower, one house, one palace after another sank away, until in an instant Yun City had become a blank expanse of bare ground. The dragon-qilin hastily trod upon its fiery clouds and soared into the air; Shen Mu leaped onto its back, while Xiong Qi'er clutched tight to the dragon-qilin's mane and stared down in terror.
The empty city below abruptly split apart, and blocks of square-cut stone rose from the depths. Layer upon layer these blocks stacked themselves, forming square stone pillars, and the pillars rose with astonishing speed; in less than a breath, a forest of square columns had sprung up all around Shen Mu and his companions.
Standing amid that forest, they seemed utterly insignificant. These pillars were in fact moving at flying speed, concealing within them the transformations of an array. Each time a pillar moved, it would suddenly grow taller or shrink shorter, as blocks of perfectly square stone shifted sideways or upward of their own accord, sliding into other pillars.
Some pillars lay horizontal, spanning the gaps between others like so many crossbeams, yet the length of these beams shifted ceaselessly too, now long, now short.
Ahead there would be an open path, and the next instant the stone pillars would crash together, becoming a wall of immense, crushing thickness. Yun City seemed to have come back to life—only now it was utterly unlike the city that had raced about devouring all things; now Yun City was a three-dimensional space in ceaseless transformation.
A moment before, Yun City had been merely a monstrous thing that swallowed everything, fearsome in appearance but clumsy and unwieldy, its menace not great. Now Yun City had become three-dimensional, operating in the form of an array, and its threat had risen enormously. And on all six faces of those square stones, each face was stamped with a different rune pattern; as the stones moved and reassembled, the rune face of one stone would inevitably join perfectly with the rune face of the stone beside it.
This was the strangest thing of all: the reassembling of the stones was only the surface, and the true killing intent lay hidden in the rune structures that ceaselessly split and recombined. Different combinations of rune patterns made different arrays.
This city held countless stones, and the rune patterns on them differed one from another, their possible combinations endless—and so the transformations of the array were endless as well. Shen Mu saw at once that if they stood here without moving, they would not trigger any of the array's power; but if they moved, the array's power would be unleashed.
"The divine arts of the Western Land are magnificent beyond measure! " Shen Mu sighed in heartfelt admiration.
The divine arts of the Western Land did not prize raw might as those of Jingping Kingdom did, yet this fantastical, heaven-daring ingenuity filled him with deep admiration.