Chapter 1775 — A Song Piercing the Long Wind
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
As the Salvation Golden Ship flew onward, points of light kept flashing around it and catching up with the ship at tremendous speed, and beside Lan Yutian there appeared one divine-artifact Lan Yutian after another, each exactly like him.
These divine-artifact Lan Yutians had been sent out under his own control to search for the other blood-sacrifice altars, and now that the altars had been found and a great battle was at hand, Lan Yutian recalled these artifacts to strengthen himself. Among the three of them his cultivation was the weakest, far inferior to Shang Jun and Shen Mu.
Yet his foundation was the most solid, one of the most solid under heaven, his Dao foundation the most stable, and with the Salvation Golden Ship in hand and dozens of divine artifacts beside him, though he would face deadly peril in this battle, he was not without power to fight.
The Salvation Golden Ship flew faster and faster, soon passing beyond the borders of Jingping to the frontier of the Yuan Realm, and ahead lay a place called Flywheel Fort. The Yuan Realm could be called the most flourishing of the myriad heavens and worlds, but because Jingping existed, the men and resources of the Yuan Realm had all been drawn away by Jingping, so that the remoter lands failed to prosper all the more.
Flywheel Fort was such a place.
It was called Flywheel Fort because six heavens stood there, forming the shape of a wheel in the frontier sky of the Yuan Realm, with stars strung between the six heavens like spokes radiating from a hub.
In the Longhan, Crimson Ming, and Shanghuang eras an ancient fortress stood here, a bridgehead with which the Heavenly Court guarded the Yuan Realm, a landing ground for its great armies when rebellion broke out in the Yuan Realm.
It had been abandoned since the end of the Shanghuang era, and in the Kaihuang era Yan Yunxi and Bai Yuqiong once matched their magic here.
Yan Yunxi, disguised as a man, was Kaihuang's Celestial Master Zixi, versed in all manner of learning, and the two women tested each other here in the art of formations, with the result that Celestial Master Zixi lost by a hair, yet from that time Bai Yuqiong loved Yan Yunxi, and the two exchanged tokens of pledged love.
The Heavenly Court of that time could be called the most enlightened of courts, with much exchange between the mighty of the Kaihuang era and the mighty of the Court, and little resistance to reform. After Yan Yunxi and Bai Yuqiong left, however, Flywheel Fort was utterly abandoned and left without human trace, for the two celestial masters had left behind too many formations there, great and small and of every kind, turning it into a perilous ground thick with killing intent, which naturally no one would approach. Within Flywheel Fort formations stood thick as a forest, their patterns and chains interwoven, and though twenty-four thousand years had passed since the duel of Yan and Bai, the power of the formations had not waned at all.
At this moment one great formation in the fort had been activated, turning all within it into an ocean of trees, a forest in which every tree was a living sprite that could tear itself from the earth and wield branch and root as blades to slay its foes, with gnarled limbs like dragons and pythons to strangle any who entered.
Amid the myriad trees one tree stood exceedingly tall, far surpassing the rest, and that mighty old tree had grown into human form, its crown small like the unkempt hair of an ugly man, its body huge and its head small, the crown not so thick as its trunk. Around this strange tree stood other tree giants, great and small.
All here seemed as it should be, for Yan Yunxi and Bai Yuqiong both possessed fearsome attainment in the art of formations, evolving all manner of gods and demons to increase the power of their formations, and many such formations remained in Flywheel Fort.