Tales of Herding Gods

Qin Mu’s plan was already set, and he stopped when he was a hundred miles away. The chest and the dragon qilin were right next to him.

A hundred miles was far enough. Even if the power of the trap was extremely strong, it would have a hard time trying to threaten them from such a distance.

Qin Mu grabbed a handful of yellow sand and gave a gentle blow. The sand formed into a three-inch human which landed on the ground.

This ‘sand giant’ opened its mouth to roar with a fierce look. The yellow sand around its lower body swirled, and the small sand giant rushed toward the mountain cliff that was a hundred miles away, overflowing with murderous intent.

The dragon qilin was full of anticipation, but after a moment, his anticipation started to wane. He still stared into the distance, but there was still nothing happening to the cliff.

Qin Mu jumped onto his head and looked into the distance at the ‘sand giant’. That tiny thin had just flipped across a sand dune and was trying its best to reach the cliff.

The dragon qilin yawned and roused his spirit. “Cult Master, it’s almost there, right?”

Qin Mu calculated for a moment, then said, “About an hour more or so and it will reach the place.”

The dragon qilin laid down and muttered, “Let me sleep for a while first, call me when it reaches.”

About an hour later, Qin Mu kicked this behemoth awake, and the dragon qilin hurriedly rose up while asking excitedly, “Has it reached?”

“It will reach in about half an incense’s time!” Qin Mu smiled and said, “Let’s go up into the air first. If something happens, it’ll be easier for us to escape!”

The chest climbed onto the dragon qilin’s back as well. The fatty immediately stepped on fire clouds to rise into the sky while looking into the distance. From a hundred miles away, a small thing could be faintly seen rushing toward the stone tablet while roaring fiercely. If it wasn’t for his good eyesight, he would have found it hard to differentiate it from all the sand around it.

On the other hand, Qin Mu could see it clearly. That small sand giant roared for half a day and finally came to the bottom of the stone tablet, still full of vigor.

Then, it tried its best to clear the sand away while roaring.

Qin Mu was speechless. The dragon qilin opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but he closed it again to wait quietly. He thought to himself, ‘If I’m insensitive and mention this, I reckon I won’t have anything to eat tomorrow.”

After a moment, the sand dune giant dug out a small pit and the words under the stone tablet were finally revealed. Before Qin Mu could even see what was written, the sand churned in the sandpit like raising rainbows, drowning out the tiny sand giant.

Not only was that it swallowed up, the area of dozens of miles around turned into a terrifying killing field. Yellow sand churned and covered the desert like an earthy yellow pot. From inside this earthy yellow ball came the sounds of knives crying!

The hair and scales on the dragon qilin’s body were all standing straight up from the shock. Even Qin Mu felt his hair standing on ends.

The trap was actually even more terrifying than he had imagined. Luckily, he was careful and had suggested going a hundred miles away before activating it.

In the earthy yellow pot, knife lights flew in all directions, cutting, slashing, hacking, and slicing. All kinds of transformations filled up the space of dozens of miles!

“This kind of knife skills…”

Qin Mu was slightly stunned. He suddenly had a bad feeling, like he’d seen something like that before!

But it wasn’t in Eternal Peace. It was last night, the night thirty to forty thousand years ago when he’d faced that youth called Luo Wushuang of the celestial heaven’s Spirit Elite Guards!

The knife skill that Luo Wushuang had executed actually had similarities with the knife lights in the sandpit!

“The one-armed youth is still alive? Grandmaster said that the brat won’t live for too long so I need not worry…”

Qin Mu burst out laughing, but his smile gradually froze. Not long later, his complexion turned green.

The divine art trap that Luo Wushuang had laid here was powerful. It was so unbelievably powerful that even Xing An might not have such boundless magic power.

This meant that not only did Luo Wushuang lived on, he even lived quite well. He seemed to have become very strong, a god!

He had to have kept onto the hatred for his severed arm and once stumbled upon the cliff while roaming about after becoming a god. When he saw Qin Mu’s handwriting, he had left behind a stone tablet.

If Qin Mu found his way here, he would definitely want to know what was written and suffer from the attack!

‘I really shouldn’t have said my real name and made up a fake name… However, the good thing is that we can bear the misfortune together. Luo Wushuang is too petty. Grandmaster also had a leg chopped off by me, and it was even the same leg twice, but he didn’t say anything.”

The divine art that Luo Wushuang had left behind didn’t last for long, and soon, the power dispersed. The yellow sand is the sky was sliced into dust and filled the air, fluttering in all directions when the wind blew.

Qin Mu narrowed his eyes, secretly astonished

Yesterday night, when he and Luo Wushuang had clashed, even though Luo Wushuang’s knife skills were incomparably exquisite, they were still inferior to his.

Luo Wushuang used Fission Knife Skill: one splitting into two, two into four, four into eight, and so on. When this knife skill split the tenth time, it would have one thousand and twenty-four knife lights. When it split until the fourteenth time, it could be as much as sixteen thousand.

Yet, there was a very huge flaw to this kind of knife skill, and that was Luo Wushuang’s magic power being fixed. The more times the knife lights split, the weaker the power of each individual one would become. The more splits there were, the lower the offensive power was.

Luo Wushuang could act mighty in front of other experts, but when faced with someone like Qin Mu who was a sword skill expert and a knife skill expert at the same time, he would find it hard to gain an advantage.

Because of that, even though Qin Mu’s magic power had been almost completely exhausted and he was injured, he was still able to sever one of his arms.

However, Qin Mu saw that Luo Wushuang’s knife had improved to a terrifying realm.

In a radius of dozens of miles, yellow sand had filled the sky, but the true danger still lay in the knife lights hiding within it.

It looked like there were knife lights everywhere within a radius of dozens of miles. Yet it seemed like there was only one knife light instead of many as it should have been according to Fission Knife Skill.

When a knife light slashed a grain of sand, it would reflect and bounce off. Because the speed was too fast, it created the illusion that the knife light was everywhere. Yet Luo Wushuang had only slashed once!

Qin Mu guessed that after Luo Wushuang became a god and came here, he saw the words left behind on the stone wall. From the writings, he recognized Qin Mu’s sword skill and decided to erect a stone tablet.

While standing in front of it, he probably slashed his knife down into the yellow sand, hiding its will and divine art in the yellow sand!

Some years later, when Qin Mu came to this place and activated them, they would explore with great power!

‘His knife skills have reached the realm of path.’

The corners of Qin Mu’s eyes twitched, and he walked into the dust. He braved the suffocating air and walked toward the cliff.

Luo Wushuang’s knife skills had already reached the realm of path, and like Eternal Peace Imperial Preceptor, he was a terrifying existence on the realm of path!

To have entered the path with knife, his comprehension on the knife path would definitely not be weaker than that of Butcher. The more terrifying point was that the density of his cultivation was definitely far superior!

Qin Mu was slightly stunned. The cliff in front of him was still there, and his writings were still there. The cliff was actually not damaged at all. It was as though Luo Wushuang’s divine art had purposely avoided it.

Qin Mu didn’t think much about it and looked at the stone tablet.

It was still around, not damaged at all either.

The words on the stone tablet were revealed, but what came next wasn’t ‘right now’ as Qin Mu had guessed. Instead, there was another sentence written in smaller handwriting.

“You think this is a trap, you think my knife skill here was to kill you? Wrong. Even if you had stood here, you would have been unharmed.

“I’m waiting for you, Heavenly Saint Cult Master. I’ve experienced twenty thousand years, the entire Founding Emperor Era, yet I never found any traces of Heavenly Saint Cult. That was until Founding Emperor Era ended.

“Founding Emperor’s survivors founded Heavenly Saint Cult and only at that point did I realize that the person I was waiting for didn’t exist in the past, but in the future!

“Heavenly Saint Cult, having the word ‘saint’ but, in fact, walking the devil path. Heavenly Saint Cult Master Qin Mu is actually Heavenly Devil Cult Master Qin Mu!

“Once you activate my trap, my divine art will inform me that you’re here! I’ve waited so long for you to come…”

Qin Mu’s face became grim, and he let out a shaky breath. He jumped onto the dragon qilin’s back and shouted, “Go quickly! We cannot stay here any longer!”

The dragon qilin immediately sprinted out, and the chest followed behind him as they ran for their lives.

Qin Mu’s face turned calm and collected.

It hadn’t been a trap.

Even though it looked majestic, the trap was only that Luo Wushuang would sense his divine art being activated and would know that Heavenly Saint Cult Master had arrived. It was just that!

Luo Wushuang was an old monster who had lived since thirty to forty thousand years ago and had held a grudge against Qin Mu for severing his arm during all that time. To Qin Mu, this was something that had happened last night, but to him, it was something that had happened thirty to forty thousand years ago!

He’d harbored a grudge for that long yet the trap he lay down wasn’t to kill Qin Mu but to inform him of his presence. Luo Wushuang was truly frightening!

He made his trap useless just so he could take Qin Mu’s life personally!

Qin Mu brought the chest to escape far away through the afternoon as the sun was going down in the west. The sun above the yellow desert wasn’t the same as the sun in Eternal Peace, and the whole world didn’t seem to be the same.

They sprinted frantically through the desert, but there seemed to be no end to it. The horizon couldn’t be seen, and the end couldn’t be reached.

Qin Mu couldn’t even find the crack through which they had entered.

Sweat rolled down his forehead. If he couldn’t walk out of here, then he’d die in this weird place even before Luo Wushuang came to kill him!

He could die from thirst, hunger, by becoming crazy from loneliness, or even from old age.

‘Don’t panic, don’t panic, think…’

He calmed himself and thought back to the way they had come. In the vast desert, the path that he had taken had long disappeared. Even if he could find it, he couldn’t backtrack no matter what.

‘Xing An didn’t manage to catch up to us, so he will definitely wait at the entrance of that crack, hoping for me to send myself to him.’ Qin Mu’s gaze flickered, and he raised his head. ‘At the source of Surging River, where broken cliff stretches from east to the west of Great Ruins, I saw five layers of sky overlapping! This means that there are other exits in this world, and I should be able to return to Great Ruins through them!”

The layers of formation markings swirled in his pupils as he rode with lax reins, letting the dragon qilin run west while he just looked at the sky.

When night came, the dragon qilin didn’t dare to head forward so he just jumped onto the chest while Qin Mu laid on it, still looking at the pitch black sky. The chest crossed sand dunes and continue running into the distance.

When daytime returned, Qin Mu looked much more haggard, and his eyes were bloodshot. Yet he still continued staring without slacking even the slightest.

Finally, he saw a cloud.

The world they were in was a desert without any water vapor yet a cloud had inexplicably appeared. It looked small at first, but it grew bigger and bigger the closer they got!

Qin Mu’s spirit was roused, and he jumped up while laughing. “Heaven never bars one’s way; it’s mostly humans themselves barring their own way by giving up hope! I never give up so I can make my way out alive!”

He placed the chest onto the dragon qilin’s back who rose toward that cloud.

As they did so, divine light came from the cliff. On the other side of it was a colorful world with tall vegetation and huge, brightly-colored flowers.

The divine light flowed out from the cliff like a waterfall, connecting the two worlds together.

An apparition of a young girl stepping on flowers walked over from the other world and looked at the writings on the cliff while muttering to herself, “There’s still two hundred more years to forty thousand years, but you should already be born, right? I’m still waiting for you.”

Her face carried some hidden bitterness as she said in a low voice, “I’ve lived on, but over these forty thousand years, I could never forget you… I don’t dare to grow old in fear you won’t recognize me…”

Suddenly, the stone tablet at the side rose and resonated as stones split apart, forming an arched door.

“Heavenly Devil Cult Master Qin Mu, my wait is finally over!” A one-armed figure appeared on the other side of the door with a long knife on his back. The man laughed, but it sounded like he was weeping and complaining.

When the gazes of the young girl in the divine light and the one-armed figure met, their hearts trembled.

“Survivor from the High Emperor’s era!”

“Extraterritorial devil!”