Chapter 813: Chapter 720: Great Tragedy (Extra Chapter for Monthly Votes)
"Who exactly are you?!"
The Jade Pen Scholar looked at Fang Xi, his gaze falling on the gently swaying Seven-Colored Feather Fan in Fang Xi’s palm, and he couldn’t help but be startled, "To actually wield an imitation of the Immortal Mansion Rare Treasure... Even the core inheritors of an Integration Sect might not receive such treatment..."
What frightened him even more was the power of the Spirit Realm that actually blocked off the Heaven and Earth Primordial Energy and suppressed and bound him, a Cultivator at the peak of the Returning to Emptiness mid-stage!
"The dead need not worry so much!"
Fang Xi found this ’Five Fires Seven Birds Fan’ quite useful; no matter what magic spell, divine skill, or secret skill the opponent used, he just needed to fan once!
Whoosh!
Behind him, the True Demon Illusion emerged, and he was cloaked in a layer of pitch-black Demon Armor. Threads of True Demon Qi once again infused into the Five Fires Seven Birds Fan, causing the symbols on it to emit a radiance that filled the sky, and he fanned again with a backhanded strike!
Seven-colored rays appeared, and within them, various Spirit Birds soared, transforming into a huge halo of light that swept towards the Jade Pen Scholar.
"Order!"
The Jade Pen Scholar was incredibly frustrated, pointing to the top of his head.
With a flash of Heavenly Spirit light, a chubby Nascent Soul wearing a Confucian robe emerged.
In front of it floated a treasure shaped like an inkstone platform, and it fiercely formed a spell.
The inkstone platform cracked open, emitting special auras with grand righteousness, soaring straight into the clouds.
"Grand righteousness, immunity to all laws!"
The Nascent Soul shouted coldly, and a multitude of scripture phantoms appeared around it. Countless characters from the scriptures shone brightly, like a robe enveloping its entire body.
Puff!
Then, the seven-colored radiance collided with the grand righteousness.
Part of the radiance was extinguished, but accompanied by a long cry from a Heavenly Phoenix, threads of silver intertwined within the radiance.
The Seven-Colored Fire Wheel suddenly became even more terrifying, tearing apart both the grand righteousness and the scripture defenses, and landing on the defense of an Immortal Jade amulet conjured by the Jade Pen Scholar.
Crack!
This jade amulet was smooth to the touch, exuding a ’gentlemanly’ feel, clearly a rare treasure in its own right, yet it now exploded on the spot, turning into a pile of ashes...
The remaining flames, carrying scorching heat, directly burned onto the Jade Pen Scholar’s magical body.
Blazing!
The Seven-Colored Flames engulfed the Jade Pen Scholar.
Then, chains of azure burst forth, like venomous snakes drilling into the void, yanking out a Nascent Soul clutching a silver talisman.
Fang Xi’s figure flashed, and he deftly plucked away the silver talisman, glanced at it, and couldn’t help but laugh, "A Small Void Transfer Talisman? Is this your life-saving trump card?"
This item couldn’t have come at a better time.
He had just obtained the incomplete ’Small Void Transfer Secret Talisman’ heritage, and now with this complete version to compare, the repair process should be somewhat faster.
"You can’t kill me, I’m from the Yu Family, a family of the Integration level... The ancestor will soon arrive in the Sky Brahman City!"
The Nascent Soul of the Jade Pen Scholar shouted.
"Ancestor? Then it seems he must be quite old..."
Fang Xi stroked his chin, "Well... I will see for myself."
He continued to form spells, and chains drilled straight into the Nascent Soul’s body, causing the Jade Pen Scholar to scream miserably.
Soon after, a green seal character emerged on the forehead of the Nascent Soul; it fainted into darkness.
"The Five Fires Seven Birds Fan is indeed quite useful, posing a great threat even to those in the later stages of Returning to Emptiness... It can be used as a standard magical artifact."
Fang Xi looked at the Seven-Colored Feather Fan in his heterodox incarnation’s hand and was quite satisfied with this real combat assessment.
Furthermore, he had captured the Nascent Soul of the Jade Pen Scholar.
He threw this Nascent Soul into the seal of the Earth Immortal Spiritual Realm, and it disappeared with a flash of silver light.
The heterodox incarnation’s body was rampant with Demon Fire, cleaning up the battlefield once again, then it turned into a beam of Escape Light and quickly vanished into the horizon...
Mortal Realm.
Within the Earth Immortal Spiritual Realm.
"Powerful treasures are indeed useful, but too many spoils of war are also burned away..."
Fang Xi sat cross-legged and began to count his spoils of war.
The first thing he saw was naturally the corpses of Old Lady Ning and Old Demon Ji.
These two had apparently died due to exhaustion of their lifespans, their Nascent Souls returning to emptiness and Sitting and Transforming. Their bodies were very well preserved, with no significant difference from when they were alive, aside from lacking Nascent Souls.
Fang Xi first picked up Old Lady Ning’s black wood crutch and found it to be a sixth-grade Returning to Emptiness treasure; with a slight activation, it could produce a jet-black weird wind capable of lifting sand, melting gold, and corroding souls...
"Alas, it’s not really my style and might just be consumable for passing tribulations..."
With a sigh, he took another look at the two bodies, "They’re not body cultivators, but their bodies naturally reached the Transcendent God level of body refining... If given to the Monster Tree, although it wouldn’t be possible to refine Transcendent God level Puppets, it’s equivalent to adding two sixth-grade strongmen... If combined with the ’Puppet Spirit Injection’ method I’ve comprehended, it’s actually possible to refine special Transcendent God level Puppets!"
The fifth-grade Puppet Spirit Injection method allowed division of the Array Spirit or a fragment of Tai Yi to be injected into a puppet, giving it the power to wield Heavenly and Earthly Spiritual Power.
In this way, one could piece together a complete Transcendent God level puppet.
Although... using the remains of two Returning to Emptiness Cultivators to refine merely two Transcendent God level puppets, compared to the low-level puppets that could maintain a great realm of difference, it indeed seemed like quite a loss.
But there wasn’t much that could be done, and Fang Xi wasn’t fussy about it.
The Ancestral Demon Tree immediately rustled into action as numerous Qi Roots fell and suspended the two corpses, commencing their transformation...
Fang Xi then picked up an entirely black Storage Bag and tried to probe it with a thread of his Divine Consciousness, unsurprisingly meeting resistance.
Within the Earth Immortal Spiritual Realm, layers of dark green radiance descended, enveloping the Storage Bag.
Before long, the sound of crackling echoed.
When he probed with his Divine Consciousness again, everything was unobstructed.
Subsequently, the items inside the Storage Bag all emerged before Fang Xi’s eyes.
The most important thing, of course, was the Immortal Jade, of which there were more than a hundred pieces.
Beyond that were copious amounts of bloody Demon Path materials, such as various types of Essence Blood sealed in jade vials, materials from corpses, and so on...
Fang Xi even saw a complete Primordial Chaos Beast skeleton; judging by its aura, it seemed to correspond to the advanced stage of Returning to Emptiness, and he wondered how Old Demon Ji had gotten his hands on it.
Of course, the most precious belongings on a high-rank Cultivator were often their life-bound magical artifacts!
Fang Xi had already retrieved Old Demon Ji’s Returning to Emptiness treasure from his dantian earlier and found them to be three pitch-black flying knives.
As life-bound magical artifacts, any Cultivator who tried to refine them, other than their original owner, would permanently lose part of the artifact’s power.
Not to mention if the spirit within the artifact was stubborn, it would be even more troublesome.
However, Fang Xi was indifferent, as long as he could maintain them at the sixth rank, they would just be materials to burn during the Heaven Tribulation...
’After returning to emptiness, every minor advancement in realm will bring about a Minor Heavenly Tribulation... Although it lacks the Heart Demon Tribulation, the thunder tribulation is just as terrifying and difficult to handle...’
"These two Return to Emptiness Cultivators are really poor, having only one sixth-rank treasure on them and still opposing me?"
Fang Xi was somewhat speechless.
But on reflection, if they weren’t part of the Sky Brahman Army and lacked compulsion, probably only Cultivators who were doing poorly would take the risk to pioneer new territories.
Given their small fortunes, they might have struggled to kill Wild Beasts, harvested Heavenly and Earthly Spiritual Medicine, and explored Ruins after arriving in the Sky Brahman Domain...
Besides that, there were some pills and jade slips.
After a detailed inspection of the two, Fang Xi found that among the pills there were even some ’poison pills’ mixed in, some of which had even been refined with demons.
If a Cultivator consumed them unknowingly, they would, at the very least, suffer deviated cultivation...
’After all, these are stolen goods...’
’But trying to play tricks with demons in front of me... Heh...’
Fang Xi tossed the black Storage Bag aside and picked up Old Lady Ning’s.
What happened next rendered Fang Xi speechless; Old Lady Ning was even poorer than Old Demon Ji, with just over a dozen pieces of Immortal Jade and scarcely any sixth-rank rare materials inside her Storage Bag...
As for Yu Shusheng, it went without saying, his treasures had been nearly destroyed by the ’Five Fires Seven Birds Fan,’ leaving only a bit over two hundred pieces of Immortal Jade and a few sixth-rank spirit materials, as well as a ’Small Void Transfer Talisman’ as a small consolation.
"Seems like I really need to search their souls?"
Fang Xi let a Qi Root from the Demon Tree fall and open automatically, revealing the Nascent Soul inside, unconscious.
He sneered, and his aura quickly changed, from originally full of Immortal Essence to brimming with demon qi.
His Immortal Origin Energy astonishingly transformed into true demon qi!
"When it comes to soul searching... the righteous path is ultimately not as skilled as the Demon Path, after all."
Fang Xi muttered to himself, forming a hand gesture, and operated the Soul-Searching Secret Skill from the ’Self-transforming Demon Skills.’
Streams of Sky Demon Secret Knowledge burrowed into the Nascent Soul of Yu Shusheng.
The Nascent Soul’s face instantly tightened, manifesting a multitude of pained expressions.
Fang Xi, of course, ignored them entirely and just kept on urging the Magic Spell.
...
Months later.
"Winter Spring Business Group... backed by the Yu Family, huh?"
Fang Xi manipulated the two Transcendent God Puppets to cook him some Jade Void Rice while he mused to himself.
Being a Return to Emptiness Cultivator, Yu Shusheng’s memories were incredibly vast.
Even though Fang Xi was adept at Sky Demon Secret Skills and specialized in soul searching, he could only abandon a large amount of miscellaneous content and focus on a specific part.
For instance, he knew that the Winter Spring Business Group had several secret storages set up within the Sky Brahman Domain, which hid a great number of Spirit Stones and rare materials.
For some reason, Immortal Cultivators always seem to lack a sense of security, favoring the approach of a sly rabbit with three burrows.
If the Winter Spring Business Group were to be wiped out and the secrets of their storages unknown, perhaps they would turn into a new Ruins in millions of years, granting an unsuspecting Immortal Cultivator a stroke of fortune...
"And this Yu Shusheng, indeed, did not lie; he is truly a member of the Yu Family, and the Yu Family also intends to develop in the Sky Brahman Domain..."
Fang Xi’s expression became slightly stern, yet it also bore a strange smile, as if he were inclined to laugh but couldn’t bring himself to do so.
"The Yu Family is an Integration-level family from the Sword Realm, and the Sword Realm’s overlord, the ’Sword Pavilion,’ is an Integration Sect that has produced the Five Sons of Human Race. Recently, a ’Sword Bearer’ triggered the resonance of a remnant sword from an Immortal Mansion Rare Treasure, advancing his cultivation rapidly, and sword cultivators... their actions tend to be extremely fierce."
"The Yu Family has an Integration Cultivator who feels a bit constrained and thus sought to establish a branch in Sky Brahman City... This was largely promoted by Yu Shusheng’s efforts."
"That Integration-level elder ancestor will soon come to preside over Sky Brahman City for a while."
"Having lived for tens of thousands of years, he’s practically an ancient fossil, with not much longer to live, not exceeding a millennium... This is really... quite a tragedy!"