Chapter 716: Heavenly God Points the Way (1)

They hurried along.

Two months later, Wu Tie, with his three-corpse doppelgänger, together with Li Xuangui, Yuan Qilin, Mo Yun, Mo Wu, and coordinating with the one hundred eight elite disciples of the Dao Clan, had already penetrated deep into the northern border mountains.

Among the group, Mo Wu was Mo Yun's blood-related brother and likewise an Elder of the Divine Manifestation Realm.

Mo Yun excelled at forging military fortifications; his fortifications, whether defensive or offensive, were top-notch even among the Mo family.

Mo Wu, meanwhile, excelled at forging war puppets, especially skilled at using the bones of various rare birds and ferocious beasts to craft peculiarly shaped, strangely powerful war puppets, and his fire-element divine abilities were also formidable, so Wu Tie deliberately brought him along.

As for the one hundred eight Dao Clan disciples, they were all peak experts of the Embryonic Storage Realm.

Dao Xiaoke and all the Divine Manifestation and half-step Divine Manifestation experts of the Dao Clan who participated in the duel perished, leaving the Dao Clan leaderless; when Wu Tie asked Linghu Qingqing for a fief, he thereby brought all the Dao Clan peoples under his command.

In contrast, the Gong Sun clan, which was proficient in the sword way but possessed negligible true combat strength, was generously yielded by Wu Tie to Linghu Qingqing.

The one hundred eight assassins versed in the art of assassination could unleash lethal force in the lofty mountains and rugged ridges that sometimes surpassed even the terror of a Divine Manifestation Realm patriarch, and their psychological shock on enemy troops was even more frightening than that of such a patriarch.

According to the intelligence provided by You Ruo, Wu Tie and his companions followed a specific direction and trekked through the mountains for several days.

That day, a prolonged chanting finally came from ahead.

The northern cold surge rolled southward, the blizzard raged in the mountains, the vast forests were blanketed in thick snow, and whether huge beasts and birds of prey or ordinary small creatures, in such dreadful weather they rarely ventured out to wander.

Only humans would, in such harsh weather, defy the natural order and roam about everywhere within the blizzard.

Wu Tie raised his right hand, clenched his fist, and the one hundred eight Dao Clan elites accompanying him vanished silently into the blizzard; originally, when they followed Wu Tie on foot, their footprints in the snow were merely tiny dots, but now, after employing divine abilities to turn invisible, not a trace remained on the ground.

Wu Tie and the others also employed divine abilities, transforming into a pure breeze that drifted northward against the blizzard for a while.

Rounding a massive peak, the vista ahead suddenly opened up.

Between the mountains, a passageway ten li wide and seemingly endless in length appeared out of nowhere; its white, glossy ice was as flat as a grindstone, forming this drive-way of unknown length.

Hexagonal ice patterns several zhang in diameter glittered across the drive-way, wave after wave of potent ice undulations spreading outward, so that even from afar one felt as if their marrow would freeze.

"Hey hey yo~~~hey ha~~~"!

Tens of thousands of bare-chested men, their waists girded with white fur and standing over three meters tall, let out low, deep roars; each had a rope as thick as an arm resting on their shoulders, they formed orderly ranks and steadily advanced step by step.

At the end of the tens of thousands of ropes was attached a colossal ice sculpture ten thousand zhang high.

The main body of the ice sculpture was a handsome, yin‑aura young man with a human torso and a fish tail, seated upon a gigantic ice throne, his fish tail coiled around an elegantly shaped trident.

Tens of thousands of ropes bound the colossal ice sculpture, and under the strenuous pulling of the tens of thousands of men, the ice sculpture hissed as it swiftly sped forward along the smooth drive-way.

What made Wu Tie and company's hearts pound was that, as the colossal ice sculpture glided forward, countless hexagonal ice patterns on the drive-way glittered, and streams of strange ice power continually flowed into the sculpture, then along the ropes into the bodies of the tens of thousands of men.

The colossal ice sculpture glided forward a dozen li, then its entire body flashed with cold light; hearing the tens of thousands of men shout in unison, the sculpture together with the multitude instantly shifted forward several hundred li.

Glide, accumulate energy, then break space and instantaneously shift.

Wu Tie and his companions stared agape; this drive-way, and indeed the ice sculpture itself, could absolutely not be fabricated by ordinary human power—some external force must be at work.

What further left Wu Tie speechless was that, on the drive-way several hundred li behind, hundreds of large hexagonal ice patterns suddenly contracted inward and then assembled into an enormous ice ring.

Within the ring, cold light flickered, directly rending the void and creating a temporary spatial gate.

Next, throngs of burly men carrying various supplies, exhaling mist, emerged from the spatial gate. They quickly dispersed to the mountains on either side of the drive-way, and with a clanging sound rapidly erected numerous tents and warehouses alongside the drive-way.

Next, ranks of burly men wielding crude weapons—ordinary steel arms not even worthy of being called spirit weapons—marched into the mountains in large strides, beginning to search one by one for the dens where blind bears hibernated and the caves where tigers and leopards hid.

Occasionally, a huge beast would be startled by these men, frenziedly bursting from its den to launch an all‑out attack.

These men were extremely adept; with just a few moves they would slay the huge beasts and birds of prey, instantly turning the ground snow into ice to freeze the carcasses into blocks, then dragging them back to the erected barracks to store them in the warehouses.

"Foraging on the spot……these guys' logistics are quite problematic." Wu Tie pointed at the icy frost drive-way and said in a low voice, "If we could destroy this drive-way……"

Li Xuangui lifted his head and quickly glanced at the sky.

"My lord, trust this humble servant; if they truly have intervened, then we certainly cannot destroy this drive-way."

Wu Tie stared in astonishment, his eyes wide as he looked at Li Xuangui.

Li Xuangui slowly nodded, giving a bitter, speechless smile.

Tens of thousands of men dragged the colossal ice sculpture, gradually approaching the massive mountain where Wu Tie and his companions stood; this mountain, ten thousand zhang high, happened to block the drive-way straight ahead.

Wu Tie and company watched cold‑bloodedly as the men simultaneously released the ropes on their shoulders, turned about, dropped to their knees before the gigantic ice sculpture, and began to murmur an obscure, hard‑to‑understand incantation.

After about a quarter of an hour, the ice sculpture's whole body blazed with a dazzling deep‑blue divine light.

Especially the trident entwined around the sculpture's tail emitted a blinding light so intense that one could not look directly at it.

With a grating—sound of rending air, a blue‑white beam of cold light shot from the trident, formed from countless tiny ice crystals, and slammed heavily into the mountain beneath Wu Tie and his companions' feet, causing them to suddenly feel the ground give way beneath them.

The mountain, ten thousand zhang high with a base spanning nearly a hundred li, exploded with a whoosh—into a sky‑full of ice crystals, which the wind blew southward.

The cold light spewing from the trident continued to shoot forward, destroying mountain after mountain in its path.

A blast of cold wind jetted from the ten‑li‑wide straight drive-way, blowing southward; the drive-way rapidly extended southward, stretching several hundred li, nearly a thousand li, in the blink of an eye.