The people on the walls were still celebrating the victory.
Humans rarely had major victories like this against the fiends.
When Tang Jie landed on the wall, all the soldiers and cultivators looked at him with respect and reverence, and when Tang Jie walked through, everyone made way for him and sincerely bowed.
Some cultivators came forward and tried to build a relationship with him, and Tang Jie spoke with them without putting on airs. He quickly came to know these cultivators, including some of the people he had taken notice of earlier.
That white-clothed swordsman with the power of Insight was called Ximen Changfeng, and he was a sword cultivator from the western regions of Fengshan. The zither player was called Ice Phoenix, and nobody knew what her actual name was. The one using the soul-gathering banner was called Ye Xiao, and the one controlling puppets was Shentu Yuan, a member of Fengshan's Shentu Clan. The last one, who had been riding a yellow goat and holding a white lotus, was called Elder Yellow Goat. He was a hermit cultivator, and he had only emerged from his seclusion because humanity was in crisis.
Although this was their first meeting, they got along very well.
As they were chatting, an officer walked over with a silk box, which he passed to Tang Jie. "City Guardian Gu asked this lowly one to pass this to Sir."
Tang Jie took the box and looked inside, and he found that there were thirty banknotes from the Huitong Bank, each one with the denomination of one hundred thousand. The Huitong Bank was a bank in Fengshan specifically servicing cultivators, and it had branches across the country. If Gu Pinzhang was giving him these, then there was probably a branch in Dongjin Pass.
Tang Jie put them away and said, "Thank the general for his generosity for me."
The officer left without saying much more.
Tang Jie was tired from his battle, so he got away from everyone by claiming that he needed to rest.
Before he had gotten far, someone ran over and said, "True Person Tang, True Person Tang, please wait a moment!"
He turned and saw Zhao Qing panting as he ran over, holding something in his hand. It was the jade pendant art relic Tang Jie had given him earlier.
Zhao Qing said, "Sir, this is yours. I have to return it to you."
Tang Jie smiled. "I gave it to you, so you can keep it."
"How could that do? This lowly one did only a trifling task and does not dare to accept such a valuable gift," Zhao Qing hurriedly said, but from his expression, he seemed reluctant to give it back.
"'A valuable gift'…" Tang Jie muttered. For a mortal soldier, this jade pendant truly was worthy of being a family treasure.
After some thought, Tang Jie said, "Why don't we do this? As I've just arrived in Dongjin Pass, I'm not familiar with the area. You can be my guide and take me around, and this will be your reward. What do you think?"
Zhao Qing was taken aback.
Just being a guide would let him get an art relic?
"What? Do you not want to?" Tang Jie indifferently asked.
Zhao Qing came to his senses and vigorously nodded. "I do! I want to!"
"Then let's go." Tang Jie started walking.
Unlike other cities, while Dongjin Pass was big, it wasn't bustling. Few civilians lived here, and almost everything here existed to serve the soldiers protecting the city. As a human fortress against the fiends, the entire city had been designed for war.
The insides of Dongjin Pass were like a giant maze. Not only was there no gate, even the interior structure was arranged for tactical purposes. There was a space-restricting formation laid out above the city that prevented fiends from flying in, and the streets below were narrow, with the buildings lining them being mostly made of steel. The windows faced the street, allowing those within to make attacks from them. The streets were complicated and the buildings almost identical such that one would have to live here for some time to grasp their layout and not get lost. There were also countless underground tunnels that linked to all manner of places. Together with the buildings on the surface, they created a three-dimensional defensive system.
Using spirit-sealing and isolation formations, they could weaken the fiends and give ordinary soldiers the chance to earn some merit.
Through these various methods, humanity had turned Dongjin Pass into an impenetrable fortress, making it so that even if the fiends broke through the walls, they wouldn't necessarily win. All that awaited them was even more vicious and gruesome urban combat.
Cultivator wars were both different and similar to mortal wars.
They differed when it came to abilities, which meant that cultivators didn't have to deal with many of the restrictions mortals had to deal with. For example, cultivators could fly, so complex terrain was basically meaningless to them, but what replaced it was huge and complicated defensive formations.
Dongjin Pass was a massive city that relied on defensive formations, but this massive city was actually one of the cores of an even larger formation, the Divine Heaven Devour Formation. It was this supersized formation that replaced the mountains in keeping out the fiends, and it was what made Dongjin Pass a target that needed to be attacked. Besides Tang Jie, there were sixteen Soul Transformation cultivators on the Dongjin front, but most of them were distributed across other critical locations around Dongjin, creating a vast and complicated defensive network.
Where the kinds of wars were similar was in tactics. Whether in mortal wars or cultivator wars, core principles like greater numbers overcoming smaller numbers, elites beating out rank and file, and seeking to attain victory at the smallest cost did not change. They simply manifested in different ways.
As Zhao Qing guided him through Dongjin Pass, Tang Jie came to understand this city more and more.
The more he understood, the more excited he became!
For Tang Jie, Dongjin Pass was like a paradise of formations.
Everywhere he looked, he saw flashing formation lines. The paving stones on the ground, the decorative beasts on the eaves, the signboards hanging over doors—everything had a deeper significance, with perhaps even the layout of the city being for the sake of a formation. Every street was a formation line, every special building a node, every winding alley a circuit, every refreshing well a formation eye.
Once the fiends broke through the walls, rather than a harvest, what awaited them was a meat grinder of formations and soldiers, like hunters hunting caged beasts.
The fusion of formations and nature had reached an apex in Dongjin Pass. Large formations covered small formations and small formations merged with large formations, all of them interlinked. Tang Jie was enchanted by each node and formation line he saw.
He was capable of some of these things, but there were also some things he couldn't do, and there were even things he had never even imagined. Only after seeing them did he realize that formations could be laid down this way.
Formations of such size and complexity couldn't be done by a single person. The formations here were the collective effort of hundreds of the best formation masters in the last thousand years of Fengshan's history.
For this reason, while other people might see Dongjin Pass as a slaughtering ground, it was a formation heaven for Tang Jie.
The moment he saw it, he liked it.
For the next few days, Tang Jie resided in Dongjin Pass.
Gu Pinzhang had arranged a residence for him. It should have been free, but General Gu had hardened up and charged him ten thousand spirit coins. Selling a single house for ten thousand spirit coins was quite harsh for General Gu.
Tang Jie didn't mind. He proceeded to throw himself into formation research. In the past, Tang Jie hadn't liked the Dao of Formations, but the Dao of Formations had liked him. But as the years went by and Tang Jie immersed himself in it, he had developed a deep fondness for it. To research the Dao of Formations, he even gave up on his infiltration into fiend territory.
Dongjin Pass's formations were vast and profound, and Tang Jie was quickly fascinated by his research. People would often spot Tang Jie in some random corner of Dongjin Pass, sometimes silently gazing up at the sky and at other times squatting on the ground and watching ants. There were also times when he would draw like a madman or jump up and down, and in some extreme cases, he would activate a formation, causing a great ruckus. Fortunately, he was tactful enough to not cause too much trouble. As time went on, people came to understand that Tang Jie was a little crazy, and they started calling him Madman Tang Jie.
Some of the more insightful people knew that Tang Jie was researching the formations of Dongjin Pass, but this made them wonder: weren't all body cultivators brainless brutes? How could one be so enchanted by formations?
Besides researching formations, Tang Jie also took some time every day to head into the Astral Winds to temper his body.
He had obtained many fiend corpses from the Dongjin Pass battle, so this was the perfect time for another round of cultivation. Four years of constantly entering the Astral Wind layer of Verdant Cloud had greatly increased the time he could stay in them. Although he still wasn't confident that he could break through the Astral Winds, he was sure that as he got stronger, that day wasn't far off in the future.
Today, Tang Jie was finally on the last of his fiend corpse stockpile. His resistance to the Astral Winds had grown once more.
Looking up at the sky, Tang Jie muttered, "It's time to try."
He had been able to enter the Verdant Cloud Domain thanks to the Jade Immortal Pavilion and the Mother Cloud Essence Metal armor, but this time, Tang Jie was going to rely on himself to push through the Astral Winds.
He called out his avatar from the diagram, and the two merged.
The merged Tang Jie had the tenacity of the original body and the elegance of the avatar.
Gazing up at the green clouds above, he smiled and then soared upward.
He blasted upward like a rocket, and the green Astral Winds wrapped around him like flames. The higher he flew, the stronger the Astral Winds became, brimming with destructive power.
But Tang Jie didn't care, continuing to fly upward. The Astral Winds swept across his face like knives, but what did it matter? When he first entered, each gust would carry away large chunks of flesh with it, but the damage now was greatly reduced. Back then, Tang Jie had had to rely on his formidable recovery abilities to constantly heal his injuries, engaging in a desperate struggle with the terrifying Astral Winds.
As someone who had entered the Astral Winds countless times, Tang Jie had long ago gotten a handle on their strength, and he knew that he was bound to be the winner. In the process, though, there was a small miscalculation, which was that Tang Jie found that leaving the Verdant Cloud Domain took longer than entering the Verdant Cloud Domain, probably because falling would always be faster than rising.
This miscalculation meant that Tang Jie spent almost fifteen more minutes than he expected in flight, but in the end, he managed to endure it.
As he broke through the Astral Wind layer, Tang Jie returned to the infinite void.
Looking down at the churning green clouds, Tang Jie laughed, "I've done it!"
A massive step!
Starting from today, the Verdant Cloud Domain was no longer his cage! He was once more free to roam as he pleased!
Comments