Chapter 1738 — The Hunter of the Seventeenth Epoch
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
Beneath the World Tree, surge after surge of throbbing pulses came, urgent and violent; Shen Mu sensed them from far off, and his heart slowly sank. From the fluctuations of those divine abilities he could tell which belonged to Xu Shenghua and which to Lingguan.
Lingguan's two ancient-god clones were now closing in on Xu Shenghua with a strange art of joint slaughter: the two ancient gods at times merged into one and at times parted again, and the great Daos the two commanded were not the same — yet each man's Dao was a Dao attuned to the Dao Flower and the Dao Fruit. To break Great Black Mountain, the Hall Master Lingguan had truly spared no pains!
He had attained the Dao four times in all, bearing three Dao Fruits and opening one Dao Flower. Shen Mu had destroyed one of them before, and just now another had been spent to block Shen Mu's way and was likewise destroyed. With the one Dao Fruit and one Dao Flower that remained, the clones he had chosen were matched to the Daos stored within them, and so could unleash their utmost power. The strength of those two clones must be infinitely close to that of a Dao Achiever!
"Xu Shenghua, you must not die.
. . " Shen Mu strove to quicken his steps, yet his steps only grew heavier and heavier. In that last battle his mana had been drained dry, and his body had long since reached its limit; his legs seemed not his own, and his frame seemed to bear all the heavens and myriad worlds as he struggled onward.
To race without pause, to cross battlefield after battlefield in the shortest span, to cut down the Hall Master Lingguan's ancient-god clones amid a chaotic host at the least cost and the greatest speed — that too was an unimaginable challenge for him.
His great battle in the Lingguan Treasure Hall had already overdrawn him gravely, his vital essence spent; Lingguan's clones could now even wound him in the flesh.
The pulses of divine ability from Great Black Mountain still came, and came more urgently than before — plainly, Xu Shenghua's great battle against Lingguan's two clones had reached its most critical hour. Shen Mu's figure still flew like wind and lightning, yet he staggered as he went, slower now than before by a measure he could not reckon. Then he sensed something amiss in the fluctuations.
Shen Mu lifted his head and looked toward Great Black Mountain ahead. There, another World Tree was rising slowly — Xu Shenghua's World Tree. In the year the World Tree was reborn, Xu Shenghua and Lan Yutian had sat beneath it, trying to parse the Dao hidden within the World Tree, treating the World Tree itself as a realm.
Shen Mu had meditated beside them, but comprehended nothing; so he had thought of a trick, borrowed the divine axe from Tai Yi, felled the World Tree, and transplanted it into his own divine treasury. Later, when a new tree grew, Lan Yutian and Xu Shenghua still sat beneath it, tirelessly trying to deconstruct the World Tree.
By the look of it now, Xu Shenghua had accomplished something over these years. "The thirty-third heaven of the Dao Realm.
.
.
" Shen Mu did not halt his steps; the vertical eye at his brow opened. Xu Shenghua's Dao Realm was joined to his World Tree, and that set his mind somewhat at ease.
Xu Shenghua was now, so to speak, half a Dao Achiever. He and Lan Yutian had created a new cultivation system for the future, and now that system was nearly complete.
What he and Lan Yutian had chosen was a shortcut. The traditional cultivation systems — whether the Heavenly Palace and Heavenly Court system or the Dao Realm system — were all accumulations of quantitative change.