Chapter 156: An Extraordinary Grassland

After confirming his next goal, Wang Ping left that underground cave dwelling; now he has enough spirit stones, and his realm is nearly perfected.

Within half a year there was hardly any chance to grow stronger, so he simply piloted the silver small boat deep into the wasteland; of course there was another reason prompting him to do so.

That Huo Yunzi, a late Golden Core cultivator, was slain by me, a Foundation Establishment cultivator; his backing forces will surely not let me off. For the safety of Tie Lanshan and my own, Wang Ping decided that without Golden Core cultivation he would never return to the Xichui cultivation world.

Wang Ping is already ninety-three years old; even though he possesses a lifespan of two hundred sixty years, he now has only one hundred fifty years left.

A ninety-plus-year-old Foundation Establishment Great Perfection hardly deserves the word "talent", let alone "heavenly pride".

In fact, in Xichui and the Hundred Nations Alliance, Wang Ping's age is known to many cultivators; can a ninety-plus-year-old Foundation Establishment Great Perfection be called a heavenly pride?

Or is he acclaimed by the Heavenly Pride Stele as the heavenly pride with the greatest attack power among Foundation Establishment cultivators in ten thousand years? Who knows how many thirty-something Foundation Establishment Great Perfection genius cultivators, dissatisfied, have entered the wasteland, vowing to challenge Wang Ping.

But they are destined to eat dust behind Wang Ping; the silver-white small boat streaked at extreme speed through the high sky, and by now he has penetrated five hundred thousand li into the wasteland.

On this very day, the never-stopping silver-white small boat abruptly halted.

A flash of green light passed, and Wang Ping appeared among the clouds; he stretched out his finger with a look of surprise, then slightly closed his eyes, as if sensing something.

After three breaths, Wang Ping opened his eyes and whispered: "Exactly! It truly is spiritual power!"

Whoosh!

His figure plummeted at extreme speed; soon a vast expanse of green filled his view. Having grown accustomed to the monotonous yellow-brown land over the past half year, Wang Ping suddenly saw an endless stretch of green, and was quite shocked.

He floated down lightly onto the ground; before he even reached out, a faint grassy scent mixed with earthy smell already assailed his nostrils.

Even so, Wang Ping squatted down, pinched a blade between his thumb and forefinger, and grass juice flowed out.

It really was grass, not an illusion; Wang Ping rose, his eyes showing a hint of doubt. After penetrating tens of thousands of li into the wasteland, the spiritual energy of heaven and earth had already been cut off.

How could spiritual energy appear here, over five hundred thousand li deep?

Could I have flown out of the wasteland?

Wang Ping's mind filled with questions; he stayed in place for the time it takes to finish a cup of tea, then rose to a height of a thousand meters, wanting to see how large this grassland was.

At Wang Ping's current speed, if placed in his previous life it would exceed five times the speed of sound, yet in the cultivation world no sonic boom was heard.

At such extreme speed, after half an hour he saw the edge of this great grassland; Wang Ping then flew in all four directions, and after two hours he determined that the shape of this grassland approximates a circle.

Its widest point is about six thousand li, its narrowest about five thousand five hundred li; Wang Ping flew outward a bit further, finally confirming that only here there is spiritual energy and grass, elsewhere still lies in a state of spiritual isolation, and the endless yellow-brown land remains the dominant tone.

Wang Ping turned his gaze toward the center; if he wanted to understand this place's anomaly, the answer should be found there.

After half an hour, Wang Ping stepped onto the soft grass; his divine sense kept spreading, and he had scanned the area within a hundred li of the center five times, yet his divine sense still detected no anomaly.

His divine sense, which he prided himself on, seemed useless when encountering such things, just as with the Spirit Awakening Tree before, and again now.

Finally, Wang Ping employed the unique probing technique inherent in the Qingdi Changsheng Gong, beginning to probe using these grasses.

Soon, the scenery within five hundred li appeared as a plane diagram reduced to one-hundredth scale in his sea of consciousness.

In this way, Wang Ping quickly noticed a difference: a small inner circle showed some variation, namely a difference in grass color, with some grass appearing more vividly green. He rose, flew to a height of one hundred meters, looked down again, still saw no anomaly; even ascending to a thousand meters made no difference.

Wang Ping murmured: "Could this difference not be a color difference but a difference in vitality concentration? Only under this special perspective would it manifest."

With this idea, Wang Ping took the image in his mind, scaled it accordingly, and marked the color anomalies he observed in his special perspective with water spiritual power.

After one hour, within the central hundred li, the anomalous grasses were marked by Wang Ping section by section.

Floating at a height of one hundred meters, looking down at the chaotic, intermittent patterns formed by blue bands, Wang Ping couldn't help but scratch his head; the pattern before him seemed unlike what he had imagined.

Thus he stared at the ground pattern for the time it takes to finish a cup of tea; finally Wang Ping turned his gaze to those breaks, trying to connect the discontinuous patterns, but found they could not be joined no matter how he tried.

By then the sky had darkened; this night there was no moon, so the wasteland appeared even darker.

In that dark night, the azure light emitted by the water spiritual power shone even more brightly, and the patterns likewise became clearer.

Time flowed slowly; soon a night passed, dawn broke on the horizon, threads of red light pierced the clouds, and the horizon turned from red to gold.

Initially the sunlight split by the clouds gradually converged as the great sun rose higher, merging together.

Soon all the light fused into a single sheet, and no solitary beams of sunlight could be seen anywhere in heaven and earth.

At this moment Wang Ping's state was somewhat strange; he kept recalling the process of the sunlight merging just moments before.

A thought suddenly sprang to mind: perhaps these patterns could be arranged according to spatial layers.

Once this idea arose, it could not be restrained; Wang Ping felt his idea made perfect sense.

Within a radius of one hundred li, there were five to six thousand anomalous colored bands marked by Wang Ping.

To restore them into a three-dimensional pattern would hardly be easy, but Wang Ping had plenty of time and was deeply interested in such special patterns.

He really wanted to know what the final form would look like.

Perhaps because he sensed the difficulty from the start, Wang Ping's mindset remained exceptionally calm; in his sea of consciousness, the large number of bands he had simulated were constantly being adjusted and combined by him.

This consumed a great deal of divine sense, but with the replenishment of the green liquid, Wang Ping could still persevere.

Thus, in the blink of an eye, ten days had passed.

Meanwhile, the cultivators who first entered the wasteland finally saw the place where Wang Ping and Huo Yunzi had fought.

Looking at the shattered land within a radius of one hundred li, cracks crisscrossed, and from time to time large black pits dotted the ground; when they walked into the battlefield's center, the ground there had sunk several meters, and even after half a year a scorching aura lingered in the air and on the surface.

"Is this the place where Wang Ping the Heavenly Pride battled a Golden Core true person? It's too terrifying! Probably even a single strike from there could easily kill us."

"Heh! Those who boast of challenging Wang Ping's Heavenly Sword should be made to look; each one simply doesn't know what they're talking about."

The first cultivators to arrive here gazed at the shattered earth before them, and an irrepressible feeling of awe rose in their hearts.

Among them, a monk in robes intoned a Buddhist chant: "Fellow Daoist Lan, your combat power remains astonishing!"