Chapter 1236 — Heaven's Foremost Grandmaster of the Formation Dao
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 3
Shen Mu watched the six "great water drops" fall. In the very instant the drops broke away from the land, the cubes upon their surfaces and within them clanged and shifted, and in a blink they turned into six divine cities that ringed the Ark of the Other Shore!
From water drop to divine city: the postures of the god-devils inside every cube changed at once. The fingers of the left hand, held in a mudra, shifted so that the thumb pressed down upon the middle finger while the other three stood straight and stiff; the right hand clenched into a fist, the thumb pinned beneath the palm.
As the god-devils in the cubes changed posture, the Bulwark Formation changed with them, and in this it differed from the formation art of the formation master He Yiyi.
He Yiyi's formations took stone blocks as their most basic element; the cubic blocks were covered in every kind of fundamental rune, and the runes on a cube could not change. Different blocks were pieced and combined together, and so different fundamental runes combined as well, forming different formations.
The Bulwark Formation's strength lay precisely in this: its most basic elements were the god-devils of the Bulwark Formation itself. Every god-devil could alter its own mudra, its bodily form, even its vital qi imprint, and thus they could alter the very structure of the Bulwark Formation.
To use living god-devils as the basic elements of a formation was far stronger than to use mere cubic blocks!
At the center of each of the six divine cities stood a colossal altar, and from the center of every altar light shot straight out like a pillar, linking the six divine cities, joining them into a single cube!
The light shot from the altars of the six divine cities took the form of chains, as though the Great Dao itself were woven together.
BOOM!
Beams of light came down from the heavens and fell upon the centers of the six divine-city altars, becoming six god-devils of identical appearance, who looked toward Shen Mu and Emperor Shitian Li Youran with fevered excitement. They were Han Tianjun.
He had divided himself into six, and all six were his true body; there was no such thing as a clone or an avatar among them.
Shen Mu stood upon the platform of the Ark of the Other Shore, sweeping his gaze over them one by one. Every Han Tianjun possessed a spirit fetus, a soul, a primordial spirit, a divine treasury, a Heavenly Palace. His body was strange besides: it had flesh and blood, yet his flesh and blood seemed likewise composed of countless tiny cubes, ready at any moment to scatter like sand and reassemble into the form of a body. His primordial spirit, his divine treasury, and his Heavenly Palace too seemed able to change form at any moment, to reassemble themselves.
"This Han Tianjun... his cultivation art is truly monstrous."
Shen Mu was astonished. Han Tianjun was likely the Heavenly Court's grandmaster of formation arts; one might even say he was a being on the verge of attaining the Heavenly Palace through formations, on the verge of cultivating the Emperor Throne by virtue of his mastery of formations!
The Formation Heavenly Palace was one of the acquired Great Dao Heavenly Palaces; the Blind Old Man was a great expert in that line, and even he had only cultivated the Formation Heavenly Palace a short while ago. Yet Han Tianjun had cultivated the Formation Heavenly Palace far earlier than the Blind Old Man! He had merely failed to cultivate the Emperor Throne. Even so, judging by his cultivation, he could not be far from the Emperor Throne realm. His attainments in the way of formations were, by and large, enough to bear him into the Emperor Throne realm. One had to understand that even the Heavenly Court's four Heavenly Masters had not reached the Emperor Throne through formations, but had stepped into that realm on the strength of their own individual wisdom; Han Tianjun might well become the first man to become an emperor through formations.