Chapter 782 — Forty Thousand Years of Fleeting Time
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 4
The Martial Combat Heavenly Master had hidden this world-realm within the Desolate Ruins, and it too might have been flung beyond the heavens. "Brother Mu, slow down.
" Yutian Tianzun followed behind him, panting.
Shen Mu circulated his primordial qi; a surge of mana lifted Yutian Tianzun, and they sped up.
His cultivation was deep now, so carrying Yutian Tianzun was not too taxing.
Shen Mu raced along the whole way, as though he had entered a wholly unfamiliar primeval forest. The mountains around him were tall and towering; even the trees were extraordinarily tall, far taller than the trees of the Desolate Ruins. The Yuan Realm hid many baffling mysteries; to him it was still an entirely strange world.
Yet perilous as it was, he had to press into it. The Desolate Ruins were where he had grown up, and the people of the Desolate Ruins were his kin. He walked on, he knew not how many li, then slowed his steps and raised his head to gaze at the mountains ahead.
From the ridges, clouds of radiance rose swirling.
He looked with his Jade Empyrean Sacred Eyes and saw that those radiances were exceedingly dangerous divine arts. "Go around! " Shen Mu decided at once.
He skirted the foot of the great mountain, and when he came to its shaded side, he could not help but freeze: a vast, boundless ancient battlefield lay before him, countless rays of radiance like the smoke of war strewn across it, lurking among broken walls and ruined ramparts, gorgeous, dazzling, utterly bewitching.
Shen Mu steadied himself and flew upward. After flying more than ten li, he looked down again. The ancient battlefield was very long, but not as wide as he had imagined, only a thousand li across. "Fly over it from the air? " He studied the sky above the battlefield.
The sky was quite clear. He was just about to fly across when suddenly a great golden eagle swept over his head, beating its wings onward. The golden eagle flew more than ten li, then suddenly split into pieces, falling from the sky as a heap of flesh.
Then, as the chunks fell, they kept splitting apart, becoming ever smaller morsels.
The morsels fell, growing smaller and smaller, until by the time they reached the ground they were too small to see. Shen Mu was startled. The third eye at the center of his brow opened, and the three sacred pupils looked up at the sky together.
Only then did he see that in the sky above this ancient battlefield there were black lines, crisscrossing every which way, like spider silk almost impossible to perceive, woven into a chaotic, tangled net across the heavens. "Space fissures!
" Shen Mu's scalp went numb. Flying over from above, one could hardly detect these space fissures that had almost no thickness.
To fly through would be to end up like that golden eagle.
"A thousand li. Walking it would not take long. But going around would waste far too much time. " He landed and said to Yutian Tianzun, "Follow me.
Do not wander off.
" Yutian Tianzun had seen the danger too, and nodded again and again. The two pressed deep into the ancient battlefield. Ghostly will-o'-the-wisps rose from the heaps of fallen white bones and drifted about.
Shen Mu avoided the radiances and the ghost fires, urging his sword pellet on with primordial qi; it rolled ahead of them, testing for danger. The way was peaceful.
After a hundred or so li, a ruined city appeared ahead.
They came before the city and faintly heard the sound of a qin drifting from within.
The qin music was plaintive, like a young girl weeping softly, lamenting the sorrow of times past. Shen Mu's scalp prickled. This ancient battlefield was strewn everywhere with heaped bones. How could there be qin music?
At the collapsed city gate lay several broken stone steles.
The breaks in the steles were very fresh. Shen Mu signaled Yutian Tianzun to be silent and carefully brushed the rubble from the steles. The writing on them recorded a battle.