The centipede gave chase, a savage beast blotting out the heavens, and even Tang Jie felt his blood turn cold.
In truth, this centipede was just an ordinary insect, and he only felt threatened because he had become smaller. There was no value in killing it, so Tang Jie wasn’t interested in wasting his strength.
But while he wanted to leave, the centipede wasn’t inclined to let him go.
As the centipede got closer and closer, Tang Jie’s eyes flashed, and a bolt of lightning emerged from the fog to strike the centipede. While the lightning bolt seemed flashy, if Tang Jie had been at his original size, it probably would have seemed like a small spark.
The shrinking of his body had also greatly weakened him.
Wondering what would happen if he made himself bigger, Tang Jie tried it and found that he couldn’t use such spells.
The Miniaturization Formation made it so that all body transformation spells were suppressed by the Great Dao, and even Reflections of Floating Life was affected. While he could release illusions, his clones no longer had the power to take the appearance of others. The Great Dao suppressing it was at least higher than his own.
The centipede kept charging after eating a lightning bolt, and Tang Jie grunted, “Stubborn bug, you really think I’m afraid of you?”
He let out a thunderous punch that blasted into the side of the centipede, breaking off several of its legs. Unable to stay standing, the centipede toppled over to the side while letting out a bitter shriek. But in the distance, Tang Jie saw another centipede scuttling over.
Perhaps this was because of the formation. Any outsider who entered the Miniaturization Formation was liable to be attacked by the native creatures, and while they were all ordinary in strength, they tended to group together against these outsiders.
“I guessed that it would be like this,” Tang Jie grunted.
He split himself into his original body and avatar, each going to deal with a centipede.
The avatar wielded the Sovereign Blade and chopped the newly arrived centipede in half. But while this strike was clean and vigorous, killing “such a big fellow” actually took Tang Jie a lot of strength. Right after this successful strike, the vast horde of ants arrived like a storm. Helpless, Tang Jie could only turn around and do battle with the ants.
Meanwhile, the original body was in its own fierce struggle. Right after he finished off the centipede with three punches, the ground erupted, a terrifying maw rising up to devour him. The original body hastily jumped away and just barely managed to avoid what he found to be an earthworm.
However, this earthworm had turned into a horrifying earth dragon with a chrysanthemum-like mouth ringed by row after row of sharp teeth. Tang Jie had never closely inspected the mouth cavity of an earthworm before, and had never imagined it to be so savage and repulsive.
The serpentine body wriggled out of the earth and lunged at Tang Jie. Tang Jie threw out several punches in a row, his immense strength blasting through the earth and breaking the worm into two chunks. But the earthworm refused to retreat, its two halves rising up together to swallow Tang Jie. Just when Tang Jie was about to deliver two more punches to end it all, the ground quaked, and another earthworm emerged from behind him.
On the verge of being devoured, Tang Jie bellowed, and his body began to grow.
He had gone from being a tiny fly to the earthworm to being the same height as it. Holding up his arms, he forced open the earthworm’s mouth and then ripped it in half.
“Eh?” Tang Jie gasped.
I thought I couldn’t change my body’s size.
So how did I get big?
Tang Jie hastily had his avatar try again and found that he still couldn’t use any body transformation spell arts. In other words, the formation was still working. The answer lay with himself.
Tang Jie’s original body attempted to use the Three-Heads Six-Arms Divine Connections and found that he could actually grow two heads and four arms. However, he found that his original body couldn’t grow any larger.
“In other words, this has nothing to do with spell arts. Rather, my original body is unaffected? No, it’s not completely unaffected. It can just resist the Great Dao’s power to a certain extent.”
Why could his original body resist while his avatar couldn’t?
Tang Jie swiftly realized that this probably had to do with the Parting Classic.
“The Parting Classic… goes against the Dao…”
If his guess was correct, then it was only today that he finally had some understanding of the Parting Classic’s true power.
This was the real Parting Classic!
Tang Jie found that he had only made meager progress on the path of body refining, that he still knew too little!
Tang Jie’s original body had grown to about the size of an ant, and his strength had also grown. Before, it had taken several punches to kill one centipede, but now, one punch could unleash a swath of destruction.
This made the following battle much simpler. The ants were no longer a match for Tang Jie and were easily slaughtered.
Tang Jie felt greatly refreshed after the massacre.
If he ran into the Flame Celestial Sovereign and the others, he could simply stomp them to death like they were ants.
At this moment, a voice rang out in Tang Jie’s mind: “Big Brother! Big Brother!”
“Yiyi, where are you?”
“Big Brother, I, Miaoran, Big Sister Vermillion Bird, and everyone else are all in the valley. For some reason, we’ve all gotten small, and a lot of bugs are chasing us!” Yiyi replied in panic.
“Do you know where you are? Big Brother will come and find you.”
“I can’t tell. There’s a bunch of big rocks and fog!”
Only then did Tang Jie remember that they had all been shrunk down and had no means of finding out where they were. And because of the Dao Formation, Tang Jie found it very difficult to find them. Perhaps even if he were right next to them, he might not be able to see them.
As Tang Jie started to panic, he saw a streak of light in the sky.
Tang Jie looked over and found that it was a trace of a formation line.
“Heavenly Formation Traces? Positional Light Rivers?” Tang Jie blurted out.
Heavenly Formation Traces were a sign that a formation was operating at full power, while Positional Light Rivers were formation lines that could only be seen from a special location. They indicated certain operating principles of the formation, and if they were discovered, one could use them to break the formation. Under normal circumstances, Tang Jie would need to find the right “position” to see the Light Rivers, but right now, his original body was able to resist the Dao of this place, meaning that just sitting at a certain altitude allowed him to see this Light River.
Of course, it was thanks to his understanding of formations that he even knew what he was looking at. Anyone else would have been unable to use this discovery. As he gazed at the Light River, he made some quick calculations and gained some understanding of the coordinates of this valley formation. Alas, knowledge of the formation told him nothing about where Yiyi and the others were.
He hastily said, “The Life Gate is in the north. Run north!”
“But we can’t tell which way is north,” Yiyi sobbed.
Tang Jie slapped his forehead. There was no way to tell east from west here, unless one was proficient in formations like him.
It was impossible for them to get out of the formation on their own, so Tang Jie clenched his teeth and said, “Hold out as long as you can and try not to move. I’ll solve the formation and come to you.”
He had originally planned to get rid of the three Earth Immortals first, but it seemed that Yiyi and the others would fall before that could happen, so he had to go and save them first.