After leaving Tian Yuan City by more than a hundred miles, Zhang Tie suddenly stopped.
He looked around, his spiritual sense spreading in all directions like a tide. Only after confirming that there were no cultivators within ten miles did he slowly raise his right hand.
His five fingers spread slightly, fine black arcs of lightning flickering at his fingertips. As he softly chanted an inaudible incantation, four gleaming white stone pillars appeared.
Each pillar was as thick as an adult's head and three zhang tall, their surfaces densely engraved with countless spirit patterns.
These patterns were not still. Instead, they slowly flowed across the pillars like living creatures, sometimes giving off a faint silver glow and sometimes vanishing into the stone's natural color.
If a cultivator proficient in formations had been present, they would have recognized that these spirit patterns contained the powers of two entirely different laws at once: space and lightning.
The four stone pillars stood in a square around Zhang Tie. His expression turned solemn as his hands formed a complex seal before his chest, and surging black lightning immediately enveloped his body.
The lightning was not violent. Instead, it circulated around him as though alive, gradually splitting into countless silk-thin arcs that silently entered the four stone pillars.
As the lightning power poured in, the spirit patterns on the pillars seemed to awaken, turning from white to black at a visible speed.
In mere moments, the four pillars had completely turned ink-black. Black lightning snakes occasionally slithered over their surfaces, yet not a sound was made. However, the pressure in the air grew heavier and heavier, like the stillness before a storm, suffocatingly oppressive.
"Haste!"
Zhang Tie uttered an ancient syllable, and the hand seal before him suddenly changed.
The four stone pillars moved at