166: Chapter 166 Resentment Soars to the Sky

Before the door cast from immensely thick pure lead-steel, the lingering heat of the battle on the 10th Floor gradually dissipated.

Gu Shen stood outside the door, feeling the extreme chill and deathly silence seeping from behind the lead-steel door panel. The skull symbol and warning text on the door signaled the extreme danger ahead.

As he was about to step into a heavily polluted death zone, the upper limit of his defensive gear would determine his margin for error.

Gu Shen swept his sleeve and sat cross-legged. Deep within his Sea of Consciousness, the ancient [Heaven and Earth Furnace] emitted a roar that shook his Soul. A mass of pale white flame of Law surged from the Void Realm and hovered before him.

He unfastened his defensive Magical Artifact, the black turtle shield, and tossed it into the fire. He then extracted from his Storage Ring the piece of alienated iron armor plate obtained from the Wasteland, along with two high-grade bio-alloy armor plates just refined from the synthetic beasts on the 10th Floor, and cast them all into the void fire.

The fire of Law instantly swallowed all the Materials.

Impurities were completely removed; the spiritual power formation patterns of the Magical Artifact and the physical toughness of the high-grade bio-alloy fused perfectly under the tempering of the Law. After a few breaths, the firelight faded, and a heavy shield that was pitch black all over, with fine alloy barbs on its surface, hovered in mid-air. The heavy pressure emitted by the shield far exceeded that of ordinary top-grade Magical Artifacts.

Gu Shen put away the newly forged [Alienated black turtle shield] and then removed the thousand-tough black silk armor he was wearing close to his body.

The reverse scale of the Sea-Covering Black Dragon, severed in the Yunmeng Great Swamp, along with two high-grade rare alloy modules resistant to high temperatures and radiation, were then cast into the Great Furnace.

The pale white flames churned violently. The remnant Demon King pressure within the black dragon's reverse scale was forcibly smoothed out, and its absolute Spell resistance and the physical defense of the alloy modules were thoroughly fused into the fibers of the black silk armor.

In an instant, a [black flood dragon black gold armor], shimmering with a dark golden light and possessing an extremely thin yet incomparably tough texture, was forged. Gu Shen put it on close to his body, and a warm, enveloping sensation immediately protected his limbs and bones.

Finally, he removed his shadow shoes and tossed in a high-grade rare alloy module and half a catty of thunder magnetic fine sand. Under the tempering of the Great Furnace, the Magical Artifact, originally focused on stealth, was endowed with violent thunder-magnetic attributes, advancing into the [thunder shadow boots], which shimmered with flashes of thunder.

With the equipment upgrade complete, Gu Shen took a specially made wooden box engraved with Yin-locking formation patterns from his Storage Ring.

Pushing open the lid of the wooden box, three living Nine Nether Silkworms, pitch black all over and emitting a faint, chilling aura, were resting on a cushion.

Gu Shen took out a piece of Death Qi Poison Wood Crystal refined on the 7th Floor. He shattered this crystal, which contained extreme Yin-cold Qi and mutated toxins, into extremely fine black powder and sprinkled it evenly into the wooden box.

Sensing the pure Yin-cold Death Qi, the three Nether Silkworms instantly awoke. They arched their boneless, supple bodies, their mouthparts opening and closing as they greedily devoured the scattered black powder.

After swallowing the Poison Wood Crystal, a strange black light appeared on the surface of the Nether Silkworms' pitch-black bodies, and the Yin-cold Qi within them climbed exponentially. They began to writhe violently, the spiracles on their abdomens opening and closing rhythmically as they entered a long and arduous stage of silk-spinning.

Gu Shen sat cross-legged in silence, with his AI Crystal splitting off a thread to monitor the energy reaction inside the wooden box at all times. The Nine Nether Silkworms consumed a great deal of Origin when spinning silk; the condensation of every inch of thread required the repeated compression and purification of the devoured Yin-cold Qi.

Time passed bit by bit. After a full three hours, the temperature inside the wooden box had dropped to freezing, and thick white frost had condensed in the surrounding air.

The three Nether Silkworms finally stopped writhing, and at the edge of each of their mouthparts hung an Yin-cold thread that was almost completely transparent, as thin as a gossamer, yet emitted a bone-chilling cold.

After finishing the silk-spinning, their bodies visibly shriveled, their vital signs dropped to a minimum, and they fell into a deep slumber. It would be impossible to forcibly wake them again in the short term.

Gu Shen flicked his fingertips, and his True Origin transformed into invisible tweezers, carefully extracting the three newly obtained threads. Together with the three he already possessed, he stored them between the finger bones of his hands. The six "Soul-Pulling Threads" lay dormant deep within his Meridians, ready at any moment to form a more complex web for object control and strangulation.

Prepared, Gu Shen stood up.

"Breach the door."

No. 7 and No. 9 Iron Guard stepped forward. Their titanium-tungsten alloy heavy fists, carrying the surging kinetic energy of micro-Fusion batteries, struck the three-foot-thick lead-steel door with a heavy blow.

Accompanied by a deafening sound of metal tearing, the internal mechanical locking gears shattered completely, and the heavy lead-steel door collapsed with a crash.

A wave of gray-black mist, so dense it had almost materialized, surged out from the space behind the door.

Gu Shen's gaze pierced through the thick fog.

The space of the 11th Floor was as vast as an underground plain. There was no display of technological facilities here; as far as the eye could see, there were towering mountains made of countless radiation-proof lead barrels stacked together.

Many of the lead barrels had long since ruptured under the erosion of time and the expansion of internal gases, scattering countless pale, twisted human skeletons.

"Master, the radiation dosage in the air has reached tens of thousands of times the lethal standard." The Crab's mechanical probe emitted a faint sound of protest. "Logs record that during the Early Stage of the Ascension Project, the reactor suffered a serious leak. Hundreds of thousands of lower-class civilians and laborers were severely infected and were concentrated and discarded here for closed isolation."

Every skeleton here carried memories of dying in extreme pain and despair.

Thousands of resentments, under the catalysis of closed, high-intensity radiation, had fermented for hundreds of years, forcibly spawning a "Realm of Evil Qi" comparable to the forbidden zones of the Cultivation World in this spiritless Wasteland.

Gu Shen stepped into this mountain of corpses and sea of blood.

The gray-black Evil Qi seemed to smell the Yang Qi of a living person and instantly boiled over. Countless twisted human faces emerged in the mist, emitting shrill, silent roars as they swept toward Gu Shen from all directions.

The Cyber Iron Guards protected Gu Shen in the center. These metal monsters, which had no Soul and were wrapped in spirit-severing demon bones and titanium-tungsten armor, were completely unaffected by the Evil Qi.

However, the Evil Qi was pervasive; it went straight through the Iron Guards' defensive line and struck Gu Shen's body surface.

The black flood dragon black gold armor emitted a faint dark golden halo, blocking all the Evil Qi that attempted to invade his torso. The Dark Gold Thunder Bone emitted a muffled sound of thunder beneath his skin and flesh, and the extremely rigid and Yang-aligned blood energy burned the resentment approaching his face into puffs of blue smoke.

Gu Shen looked around the massive underground mausoleum with deep eyes.

The folding of classes was vividly displayed in the apocalypse. However, for a Cultivator pursuing the Dao, whether it was the executives in the luxurious rooms on the 7th Floor or the civilians in the lead barrels on the 11th Floor, after death, they were all just a form of energy between Heaven and Earth.

Resentment was also an ultimate resource.

Gu Shen stopped in front of a huge mountain of corpses.

He slowly raised his hands, and his ten fingers formed an ancient seal.

"Refine."

The [Heaven and Earth Furnace] in his Sea of Consciousness burst out of his body, transforming into an illusory giant cauldron several zhang high in mid-air. The pale white fire of Law poured down from the mouth of the cauldron like a waterfall, instantly covering the mountain of corpses and the dense Evil Qi mist within a radius of a hundred zhang.

The fire of Law burned frantically.

Those physical remnants containing radiation and biochemical toxins were completely incinerated, and the gray-black resentment rolling in the air was forcibly sucked into the Great Furnace. The unconscious, shrill wails struggled violently in the firelight, only to have all emotional imprints wiped away under the higher-dimensional Laws of Heaven and Earth, leaving behind only the purest Yin-cold spiritual energy.

An incense stick's worth of time passed.

The Evil Qi within a hundred zhang was drained, and the view became clear.

Gu Shen beckoned, and the illusory giant cauldron hovering in mid-air disintegrated with a crash, turning into a stream of light that escaped into his Sea of Consciousness.

In mid-air, three polyhedral crystals, the size of dragon eyes and deep, pitch-black all over, slowly drifted into his palm. The crystals felt extremely cold to the touch, and it seemed as if countless gray nebulae were flowing within them.

[Refining complete. Obtained: three Resentment Crystals of All Living Beings.]

This crystal, highly compressed from pure negative spiritual energy, was enough to make any Cultivator practicing Demonic Path Divine Soul Cultivation Techniques in the Cultivation World go crazy for it. It was, furthermore, a top-grade main material for forging Magic Treasures for attacking the Divine Soul.

Gu Shen sealed the Resentment Crystals of All Living Beings into a specially made jade box and safely stored it in his Storage Ring.

He passed through the area of the mountain of corpses that had been cleared into a blank space and cast his gaze toward the entrance of the passage leading to the bottom floor at the deepest part of the 11th Floor.

That was the last line of defense leading to the radiation buffer zone of the 12th Floor.

A trace of deep blue electric light flickered on the thunder shadow boots at Gu Shen's feet, and he walked steadily toward the deepest part of the darkness, with the twelve Cyber Iron Guards in tow.