Chapter 1718 — The Dream-Chasing Youth, Part One
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 4 of 6
In the villages, in the cities, the crying rose to heaven; women and children clung to one another; the young tried to fight to the death to protect their wives and children, but it availed them nothing.
In that moment they overcame the servility in their hearts, but they had no strength to resist.
Bai Yuqiong strove hard to steady her mind as she watched scene after scene unfold. She felt that she, in this moment, was like the numbed people of the Southern Heaven: no blood in her, nothing left but servility.
Now the people of Yanming Heaven had overcome the servility in their hearts, had overcome the enslaving education of Heavenly Venerable Fire; yet the servility in her own heart she could not overcome.
She strove to persuade herself that she still had human heavens under her command, and that to rebel against the Heavenly Court for the sake of the Southern Heaven's slaves would cost those people their lives.
That she was only enduring in silence, only bending to preserve what she could; that it was not that a kneeling self was hidden in her heart — that she had always stood upright, and had never knelt.
Yet her conscience told her that she had always been kneeling, and had never once stood.
Suddenly, from the distant Heavenly River came waves of dreadful palpitation. Meng Yungui, leading more than a hundred officers and men of the Feather Ascension Camp, had stormed the Heavenly Court's supply ships, slaying the Heavenly Court's soldiers aboard the tower-ships!
Heavenly King Yiluo's eyes lit up; with a swish his twin wings unfolded behind him, and he laughed aloud: "Heavenly Preceptor Meng has walked into my jar!"
He shrieked and flew there; and at that same moment, from tower-ship after Heavenly Court tower-ship, countless Heavenly Court gods and demons flew out of the holds and hurled themselves madly at the tower-ship where Meng Yungui stood!
Heavenly King Yiluo had long since laid an ambush. These Heavenly Court gods and demons were picked fierce generals, of profound cultivation, drawn up in strict formations, and they were many!
At the very front charged twenty thousand of the Divine Martial Guard!
The Second Divine Martial Guard had been smashed by Long Qilin, Meng Yungui, and the rest, and only a little over twenty thousand remained; discounting the sick and maimed, some twenty thousand still.
Yiluo commanded troops and was skilled at integration; he formed these twenty thousand into a single battle array, taking the Heavenly Court's Vast Heaven Diagram as its diagram.
The breath of these twenty thousand Divine Martial Guards was joined, their mana joined, their momentum joined; they stirred the Vast Heaven Diagram, and lo, palace after heavenly palace rose up out of the diagram, and the palaces formed a small Heavenly Court!
Within that small Heavenly Court, the primal spirits of the twenty thousand Divine Martial Guard officers and men merged and became one primal spirit towering to the very heaven, in the likeness of Divine Emperor Langxuan, raising a hand and pointing one finger!
Divine Essence Finger!
The power of that blow could not match a true Heavenly Venerable, and fell far short of Divine Emperor Langxuan; yet the power of that blow was also inconceivably great!
Had the Second Divine Martial Guard not been so grievously mauled, that blow would have carried the power of a Heavenly Venerable!
The Vast Heaven Diagram, too, was a battle diagram Meng Yungui himself had designed; now it was turned against him to kill him — what irony.
Meng Yungui stood upon that tower-ship, of one mind with the hundred-odd Feather Ascension Camp officers and men behind him, forming a small-scale array; their vital essence was as one, and they stirred the array. Meng Yungui's cultivation was at the Emperor Throne realm, while the other Feather Ascension Camp officers and men were far inferior.
Together they stirred the array, and it too was a small Vast Heaven Diagram — Divine Essence Finger!
Boom!