Chapter 852 — From This Day, Forever Parted from You
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
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.