56: Chapter 56 Embryo

Everything given to them by the Wanling Guixu Scroll—cultivation, Lifespan, blood vitality, and Divine Soul, even every wisp of living soul and drop of essence blood they had devoured and refined—was being reclaimed by that formation, leaving nothing behind.

They shrieked and wailed. Some frantically tore at their own flesh, trying to gouge out those invisible plundering hands from within their bodies; some knelt and kowtowed, weeping and begging for mercy in the direction of the Heavenly Demon Hall; some died without ever understanding why they, who were clearly demonic cultivators, predators, and beings at the top of the food chain—

Why had they become the ones being refined?

True Lord Luoxia watched all of this.

He saw a demonic cultivator at the Early Golden Core Stage in the nearest village scratching his face in despair. Most of the cultivator's face had already dissolved, revealing the forest-white skull beneath.

The last wisp of black Qi escaped from his seven orifices, merging into the colossal formation that shrouded heaven and earth.

The Golden Core fell, and flesh and bone turned to ash.

True Lord Luoxia closed his eyes.

As far as his Divine Thought could reach, thousands upon thousands of demonic cultivators within the borders of Great Qian were dying simultaneously. They died by the power they were most proud of, by the Cultivation Techniques they had used to slaughter commoners, and by the Wanling Guixu Scroll that they had revered as an absolute truth until their deaths.

And that formation, using their flesh and Divine Souls as fuel, was slowly starting up.

Its true purpose was now clear for all to see.

It was not for killing, nor for trapping enemies.

It was for refining.

Refining all living beings.

Those six Late Golden Core Stage demonic cultivators, and those practitioners of the Wanling Guixu Scroll scattered throughout Great Qian who were falling in droves—

They were never the hunters.

They were captive bait, wolf cubs released among a flock of sheep. Once they grew fat and strong, their claws and teeth sharpened, and they had devoured enough living beings to refine themselves into the purest flesh and Divine Souls—

They were then rounded up and harvested in one fell swoop.

This was a method more malicious than slaughtering a city, a mercy more cruel than killing.

To let the prey believe they had become the hunter, and let the meat on the chopping block think they were also the diner.

Then, as the feast was about to begin, the blade would be turned, and all the 'diners' at the table would be thrown into the cauldron to be brewed into a thick soup for the sole master.

True Lord Luoxia opened his eyes.

He stood beneath the formation that covered the entirety of Great Qian, amidst the sky full of drifting ash from the thousands of dissolved demonic cultivators, his sleeves stained with a bit of gray-white debris.

That was not ash.

Those were the remains of the demonic cultivators who had once bitterly sought immortality.

He lowered his gaze to his palm.

When those six incantations flew out earlier, he had tried to intercept one. With a cultivation at the Middle Stage of the Nascent Soul, this should not have been impossible.

However, the incantation passed through his grasp like water through fingers, like moonlight through a window lattice.

How could the chess game that old Devil Head had planned for who knows how long leave such an obvious flaw?

True Lord Luoxia slowly clenched his palm.

The Void Realm silently collapsed between his fingers, then slowly restored itself.

At this moment, the commoners of Qingzhou felt their legs go weak as they watched the sky and earth change color.

An old man knelt and kowtowed, his forehead hitting the bluestone pavement until blood mixed with tears and spread out, his mouth murmuring the names of gods and buddhas he hadn't worshipped in a long time;

A woman tightly hugged the child in her arms, pressing his head into her chest, yet she dared not close her own eyes, staring blankly at the churning blood clouds as tears rolled down silently.

"The end... the end has come..."

No one knew who shouted it first, but then the cries spread like a plague, sweeping through the entire city of Qingzhou in an instant. The wailing of infants, the laments of old women, and the suppressed sobs of grown men merged into a tide of despair, battering against every inch of the city walls and every tightly closed door.

Yun Ming was also rushing home in a panic.

"What on earth is happening!"

How could he know that this scene of the heavens being swallowed was merely a True Lord at the Great Perfection of the Nascent Soul, who had lived for over a thousand years, paving a path to ascend even further.

Zhao Zheng had taken him too far away.

By the time Yun Ming reached Qingzhou City, night had fallen—not the natural dusk, but a sky half-reddened by firelight.

Fires were breaking out everywhere in the city.

The grain shops in the East Market were being looted in the Chaos, bags of white flour scattered in the middle of the street and trampled into the bloody mud; the door of the pharmacy on the West Street was shattered, and the young apprentice lay dead before the steps, still clutching a handful of herbs he had never delivered; the mansions of the wealthy in the south of the city were ablaze, their vermilion gates wide open, with gold and silver valuables scattered everywhere, left unpicked.

Everyone was fleeing for their lives.

Yet there was nowhere to run.

The city gates were wide open, but outside the city was also covered by blood clouds and scorched earth.

Some rushed out only to turn back, running through the alleys like madmen, like beasts trapped in a cage; some could no longer run and sat paralyzed by the roadside, staring blankly at the firelight, neither crying nor shouting, only repeatedly stroking the face of the cold child in their arms; still others knelt before collapsed temples, their heads thumping against the ground as they recited the names of deities they themselves couldn't remember, praying for a miracle that would never come.

Even more...

Gave up on the bottom line of being human.

As Yun Ming passed a dark alley, he heard the sound of crying.

It wasn't the cry of fear, but a broken whimper of despair from being unable to struggle.

He stopped and turned around.

Deep in the alley, two men were pinning down a woman. Half of the woman's dress had been torn away, revealing her pale shoulders; she kicked and fought desperately, her fingernails clawing ten bloody streaks into the ground, but she couldn't break free from the two large hands tightly gripping her wrists.

"Scream, scream louder, we're all going to die anyway—"

"If we're going to die, we might as well die happy!"

The laughter was crude, mixed with the woman's weakening sobs.

Yun Ming did not make a sound.

He raised his hand, pressed two fingers together, and made a phantom stroke in the air.

Two extremely thin strands of Sword Qi swept out from his fingertips, vanishing into the night, lighter than a candle flame.

The laughter stopped abruptly.

The heads of the two men slid off their necks almost simultaneously, the cuts as smooth as mirrors, with not even much blood gushing out—their bodies maintained their posture of violence, stiffening for a breath before crashing to the ground.

The woman curled up against the wall, shivering, not daring to look up.

Yun Ming didn't look at her. He lowered his hand and turned to leave.

But his peripheral vision caught something strange.

He stopped and looked back.

Those two headless corpses—were dissipating.

It wasn't the usual post-mortem stiffening or decay, but starting from the edges, they turned inch by inch into extremely fine and light red points of light, like fireflies, like drifting embers, rising slowly.

Yun Ming's pupils constricted.

He followed those wisps of red light and looked up—

And then he saw it.

He saw a sight he would never forget for the rest of his life.

In the very center of the firmament, deep within the vortex formed by the blood clouds, an object was slowly taking shape.

It was an embryo.

An embryo so massive it occupied nearly half the sky, entirely crimson and translucent like glazed glass, with faint veins visible inside like rivers crossing the land. Those red lights rising from all over Great Qian—those escaping from the corpses of thousands of demonic cultivators and those rising from the remains of the two thugs just now—were continuously flowing into it, like all rivers returning to the sea, like a myriad of streams paying homage to their source.

With every strand of red light that merged into it, the embryo would throb occasionally.

Like a heartbeat.

Yun Ming stood blankly at the mouth of the alley, his neck tilted back to the limit, yet his gaze could not move an inch.

He saw a humanoid silhouette beneath that transparent fetal membrane.

At first, it was just a blur, limbs not yet separated, features chaotic. As the red light poured in, the silhouette gradually became clear—

The shoulders and back, the spine, the bent knees, the hanging arms.

And then, the face.

The features were still shrouded in blood-light and couldn't be seen clearly, only the curve of the brow bone and the line of the jaw could be faintly discerned.

But it was enough to make Yun Ming's entire body turn cold and stiff.

The person inside that embryo was slowly opening their eyes.