Chapter 188 — Who Can Tell Male from Female
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Everyone fled in panic, carrying the dragon qilin with them. The dragon qilin was wounded and could not move easily, so Xue Hu'er sprang onto Shen Mu's bundle, at once worked a spell, and summoned a whirlwind that swept the dragon qilin up into its coils and bore him along as they all fought their way out. Behind them, Tianbo City, built upon the mountains along the river, was collapsing.
The enormous Demon King in the city was doing battle with the many experts within it, and even so he had leisure to spare: he pulverized the flesh and blood of those he killed, and with their bones and skulls he built an altar. Bloody bones and heads kept flying through the air to fall at his feet, and soon a layer of them had been laid. He had come only in magic power and consciousness; his true body remained in that so-called Dutian. Yet his strength already surpassed that of sect-master-level experts.
In the city there was not only the Dragon King of the Yulong School, a sect-master-level master, but also other experts of the Life-and-Death realm and even the Divine Bridge realm.
Yet even attacking in concert they could do nothing to the Dutian Demon King; instead they were wounded again and again. As for the army stationed in the city, the thousands upon thousands of divine-power wielders, they were wounded by the Dutian Demon King's roar, and how many his twelve gazes slew, no one could say.
The city was in utter chaos. Countless soldiers and officers, their formations broken, jostled and clamored as they fled for their lives; some leapt straight into the river, only to be smashed by the towering waves of the Yong River against the cliffs and dashed to pieces. The soldiers and officers in the city were for the most part disciples of the various schools and sects, with little military discipline to begin with; faced with such horror they collapsed at a touch, without a shred of morale, utterly unable to gather their forces and join in formations to trap the Dutian Demon King.
When Shen Mu and Bashan Jijiu had gone beyond the frontier to temper themselves, eight hundred grassland divine-power wielders working together had battered Bashan Jijiu's Sheer Cliff Tiangang art to tatters and forced him back again and again. Bashan Jijiu was a sect-master-level expert, and even he had been driven back.
In Tianbo City the divine-power wielders and martial artists numbered tens of thousands; had they joined hands, they might well have held off the Dutian Demon King for a time. Unfortunately the various schools and sects were a heap of loose sand, unable to gather together, each intent only on saving his own skin. Shen Mu looked back and saw that Long Jiaonan was still in hot pursuit — though it seemed she was not pursuing them to kill them.
"Of course. Long Jiaonan is fleeing too," Shen Mu realized. Boom— As the experts clashed, terrible shockwaves burst forth; house after house split apart and disintegrated in midair.
Shen Mu and the others were flung up by that dreadful surge, sent flying through the air, countless people flailing as they tumbled in every direction. Boom, boom.
They were still in midair, not yet landed, when several more dreadful surges came. Shen Mu was crushed until he vomited blood without cease; he hurriedly took the little fox from his back and held her in his arms, lest Xue Hu'er be shaken to death. A fourth surge struck. Shen Mu gave a stifled groan and worked the Mystic Body Three Cores Art; his body at once became incomparably hard, but still he was sent flying.
Thud.
Shen Mu crashed to the ground and rolled a dozen or more times before he stopped.
He had been thrown into a mountain forest, above which the wind howled, shearing the tops off countless trees.