Chapter 1536 — The Seventy-Two Palaces of the Imperial Capital
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
"Do the Dao-Achievers of the Jade Capital City also nurse old grudges?
Can it be that they butchered one another here? " He was about to let the leaves and branches settle again when his eyes suddenly brightened, and he strode quickly deeper into the forest.
There, in the midst of the withered Dao Trees, stood a deep well, at one time buried beneath dead branches and leaves, now exposed to view.
Shen Mu came to the edge and peered down; inside, chaos stretched dim and vast, fathomless.
"What was this well used for? " Even as he wondered, the chaos qi within the well began to churn, and something was climbing out from below.
He opened the vertical eye between his brows and stared hard.
In the well, some colossal shape was clambering up the walls on all fours.
He watched for a while before he saw clearly that it was a bizarre creature, not the behemoth he had imagined.
The strange creature carried a Dao Tree upon its back and was striving with all its might to scale the well wall, trying to climb out of the well. Yet all around it surged the waves of the Great Annihilation Tribulation, battering it down again and again; its flesh had been ground away until only bones remained, and still it clawed outward, unrelenting.
Shen Mu watched for a very long time; that Dao-Achiever never managed to climb out.
Shen Mu drew his sword, stabbed more than a hundred times around the well mouth, and then drifted lightly away. A few days later, the shattered crown of a Dao Tree rose above the rim of that chaos well.
The Dao-Achiever within had been so worn down by the Annihilation Tribulation that he had almost no dharma power left, and the Great Dao he had cultivated was largely erased as well.
Yet the mouth of the well was right before him!
This chaos well was the passage that countless expert masters of his universe, exhausting their wisdom, had opened by gathering chaos qi—a passage leading to the Miluo Palace! So long as he climbed out, so long as he reached the Jade Capital City, he could borrow the power of the Miluo Palace's master to shelter from the Annihilation Tribulation, and in days to come win a place for himself in the new universe!
Even if his Dao attainments were wiped out entirely, even if his flesh and bones were destroyed, so long as he preserved his Dao Fruit and his Dao Tree, he could rise again!
Clinging to the well wall, he strained to lift his Dao Tree on high, letting the tree go first, rising out of the well. At that very moment, sword light flashed at the rim.
The Dao-Achiever looked up and saw beam after beam of sword light, bearing utterly dreadful might, stab into his Dao Tree and his Dao Fruit—swish, swish, swish! Reduced to a dried skeleton, he could once have brushed away such sword light with ease; but now he could only watch helplessly as those beams pierced his Dao Fruit!
"Who has ambushed me, Heavenly Lord Fude? !
" He had time for only that single roar before he saw his Dao Fruit cut down by the sword light, torn from the tree, tumbling into the chaos qi of the well, where the Annihilation Tribulation devoured it.
With his Dao Fruit destroyed, the Dao-Achiever's strength ebbed utterly away; he fell from the wall and plunged, together with his Dao Tree, into the Annihilation Tribulation. "That chaos well is strange.
The bottom of it should connect to the previous universe. How odd—shouldn't that Dao-Achiever simply have entered the Jade Capital City directly to hide from the Great Annihilation Tribulation?
Why bore a well and smuggle himself into the city?
" Shen Mu came before a great hall and mused, "The Dao Tree grove outside the well is full of dead Dao-Achievers as well. Could they all have smuggled themselves over through that well?
Then who killed them?