Chapter 852 — From This Day, Forever Parted from You
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
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.