Xu Ying snorted, helpless before the two maniacal demons. They were actually trying to incite him to rebel against humanity, overthrow human rule, and establish a terrestrial demon kingdom on the surface.
"You shall be our king, and we two shall serve you loyally!" they clamored.
The cave reeked of demonic energy, thick and foul, and Xu Ying could not stand it another moment. He rose and stepped outside. The world beyond was pitch-black. The storm had passed, but a fine mist still drifted through the air, and he could not tell when the sky would clear.
He stood there, dazed, lost in thought.
Human Nuo shamans located the dragon veins to pinpoint the six Hidden Gates of the Body, unsealed the gates, and then drew upon the power within to cultivate the Hidden Vision.
Qi-refiners, on the other hand, gathered qi, refined it, and assaulted the body’s Mysterious Pass.
The two systems were entirely different, with not a single point in common.
"If qi-refining is truly a human art," he wondered, "then why does it share nothing with Nuo sorcery?"
From inside the cave came the whispered conspiracy of the two demons: "Our demon race must have had a predecessor civilization before the rise of men. They built a glorious empire—even divided the realms of the living and the dead! Later, we were defeated by the humans through treachery, and the civilization was lost."
"The humans are too despicable!"
"But King Xu shall lead us to reclaim the glory of the demon race!"
"Long live King Xu!"
…
Xu Ying rolled his eyes. These two demons had imaginations wilder than his own.
He shifted his left shoulder; it still ached, though the sword wound had healed considerably. The giant deity’s flying sword had pierced his left hand and left chest, punching clean through his shoulder blade. His entire left arm had been immobile, but since he had achieved the Five Qi Returning to Origin and refined the five viscera into origin qi, his recovery had grown far swifter than before.
In the past, that wound alone would have laid him up for half a year.
"No matter what, the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury of the Zhou family has a truly astonishing recovery rate. No—beyond astonishing, it is heaven-defying!"
Xu Ying recalled the terrifying physical body of Zhou Yihang and felt a pang of envy. One who opened the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury possessed a recovery power that bordered on myth—practically unkillable!
Even if he could not match Zhou Yihang’s body, attaining even a fraction of Ding Quan’s level would be extraordinary.
Xu Ying sighed softly. The trouble was that he still did not know how to locate the dragon veins and pinpoint his own Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury. And even if he found it, without a Great Nuo Shaman to help unseal it, the discovery was useless.
And there was a more pressing question still…
"Am I human, or am I a demon?"
He gazed toward the brightening horizon and murmured, "I am human. I must be. My home is in Xu Family Terrace. I have a father and mother, both human. My father’s name is Xu Shaoping, my mother’s name is Miaoyue Mei, and she is from Miaotian Shop. I still remember the roads to Xu Family Terrace and Miaotian Shop…"
Behind him, the snake demon Yuan Qi suddenly stopped his revelry and stared at his back with puzzlement.
"What’s wrong, Seven-Brother?" asked the bear demon Xiong Qianli.
The snake demon Yuan Qi lowered his voice. "Something is strange. I clearly remember A-Ying once saying his father’s name was Xu An, his mother’s name was Tian Ruijun, and they lived at Tian Family Terrace. How did it suddenly become Xu Shaoping and Miaoyue Mei? And the place changed too…"
Xiong Qianli laughed. "He must have fainted and knocked something loose in his head! His brain’s on the fritz—so doesn’t that mean we two can become a pair of scheming ministers?"
The two demons exchanged a glance and burst into heartless celebration once more.
At last the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and light crept back into the world. Xu Ying suddenly tensed, lifting his head to scan the distance. Earlier, under cover of rain and darkness, he had not noticed the Nether River flowing not far ahead.
That torrent of the underworld surged and roared, rushing down from the direction of Stone Mountain and threading between Mount Xiao and Wuwang Mountain.
The appearance of the Nether River meant it was still night.
But had the Nether River not already changed course? Why had it not returned to its old channel?
Xu Ying squinted into the distance.
He saw the Nether River’s invasion manifesting across the forest as ghostly fires flickered among the trees. Farther off lay a cemetery also caught in the incursion. Lanterns blazed within the graveyard, and skeletons were crawling out of their graves, hanging decorations and laying out grand banquets in joyous celebration.
Some skeletons wore fine silk robes, unbuttoned and hanging open, dancing atop burial mounds to entertain the revelry.
Suddenly a low rumble shook the earth, and their cave trembled along with it.
The snake demon Yuan Qi and Xiong Qianli scrambled out of the cave. Xu Ying muttered, "Could it be the Nether River returning to its old course?"
The two demons and the boy turned toward the sound, and their faces drained of color. The embankment of the Nether River, once invisible and insubstantial, was now beginning to reveal its physical form!
The embankment grew clearer and more real by the second, invading the mortal world from that inconceivable realm beyond.
Along the banks of the Nether River, mountains and rivers materialized out of thin air, pressing against Lingling’s existing peaks. The ground shook and shuddered, roaring with the thunder of grinding stone.
The sight was terrifying. Mountain after mountain erupted along both banks of the Nether River, shoving the original ranges ever backward. Even Mount Xiao beneath their feet was quaking violently.
Mount Xiao had once lain only a few li from Wuwang Mountain, where Qinyan Cave was located. Now it had been pushed back more than thirty li.
And in those thirty li, new mountains and embankments from the underworld had appeared.
"No one does anything about an underworld invasion?" Yuan Qi cried in despair. "There are so many capable humans, so many Nuo shamans—why don’t they come and manage this? Is there no law left?"
His voice cracked with helpless fury. "My Qinyan Cave has been pushed away! When can I ever go home?"
Wuwang Mountain and Qinyan Cave had once been only four or five li away. Now he faced a journey of more than thirty li, and he would have to cross the Nether River and those underworld mountains to get there.
A chill crept into Xu Ying’s heart as well. The mountains of the living harbored demons and mountain gods—what horrors might lurk in the mountains of the dead?
If he tried to force his way through, even as a Demon King, he would be walking into certain danger.
Just then, more lights appeared below—the eyes of deities, glowing faintly in the darkness, their beams reaching out more than ten zhang.
Xu Ying’s heart sank. The rain had just stopped, dawn had not yet broken, and already the deities were scouring the mountains.
"Yuan Qi, we have to move!" Xu Ying called.
The eastern horizon was beginning to pale, and the sun would soon rise. Mist still hung in the air. The underworld continued its invasion, and the collisions between realms boomed with a deep, resonant roar as space itself grew unstable.
Yet as the morning sun climbed, the Nether River began to fade, and everything seemed to return to normal—except that the mountains along both banks remained, and had not receded back into the underworld.
The Nether River was still slowly draining away. The mountains remained dimly lit. A deity with hands splayed wide used his palms to illuminate the surroundings. In each palm was an eye the size of a man’s fist, shooting beams of divine light that pierced the gloom for more than ten zhang.
Wings beat overhead—that was the deity of Yong’an Town, a man with avian wings, soaring through the sky. His gaze burned like torches, casting twin columns of light downward.
Suddenly a shadow flickered, silent as a phantom, and appeared before the palm-eyed deity.
It was a boy, one hand holding up a bell taller than a man, lifting it as though it weighed nothing.
The palm-eyed deity had no eyes on his head—only in his palms—but he was alert. Sensing danger, he swung both hands toward the intruder.
Too late.
The boy’s other fist rocketed forward, its peak trailing a muffled peal of thunder. It struck the deity square in the chest.
The blow was devastating. In the instant it sent the deity hurtling backward, the force bored clean through his body, pulverizing everything in its path. The thunder embedded in the fist burst into the deity’s interior, shattering his divine soul before he even touched the ground. His spiritual essence crumbled to nothing.
The boy who had one-shotted the palm-eyed deity was none other than Xu Ying. His strength had grown far beyond what it had been during yesterday’s battle with the giant deity, though his left arm still ached faintly.
To keep the bell from dragging on the ground and ringing out their position, he had to carry it in his left hand.
Luckily, his cultivation of the Elephant-Force Ox-Demon Fist gave him immense strength. Holding up the bell was no burden at all.
Xu Ying did not pause. He leaped from the tree, kicked off the trunk midair to change direction, and hurtled toward the winged deity of Yong’an Town.
That deity held two hundred years of incense offerings and commanded considerable power—though less than the giant deity’s, it was still formidable. He shaped incense qi into a flying sword while flapping his wings to gain distance.
His wings gave him speed and agility, and Xu Ying, suspended in midair with no leverage, could not threaten him. If the deity dodged this one strike, he could finish Xu Ying off at his leisure.
But as Xu Ying struck down the palm-eyed deity, the winged deity of Yong’an Town had already sensed the commotion and swept his gaze onto Xu Ying. Divine light lanced from his eyes onto the boy’s body.
Xu Ying hung in the air, several zhang short of striking range, his strength spent. The deity exhaled with relief and laughed, "Brat, you’re lugging a big horn—"
In that instant, a long, slender shape flashed through the air—a great serpent launched from below, landing beneath Xu Ying’s feet.
Xu Ying planted one foot on the serpent’s back, launched himself higher, and drove his fist forward.
The deity of Yong’an Town had tempered his body with two centuries of incense offerings. Though his strength fell short of the giant deity’s, it was no trivial thing. Incense qi coalesced into a flying sword as he flapped backward, seeking to put distance between them.
He had wings—swift and nimble—while Xu Ying had nothing to push off in midair. If he evaded this strike, he could finish the boy off at will.
But the instant Xu Ying’s fist flew forward, the phantom of the Elephant-King God Body blazed into being behind him, radiating divine light, and struck as one with his fist. The surrounding air was sucked into a vacuum, robbing the winged deity of any purchase for his wings. He could not fly.
BOOM.
A thunderclap split the sky. Xu Ying’s fist shattered the incense qi sword head-on, punching clean through two hundred years of accumulated divine power as though it were nothing.
The deity’s head burst apart, spraying wood splinters in every direction. His headless body beat its wings a few more times, then crashed sidelong from the sky.
Xu Ying rode the headless body downward, landing nimbly. A deity somewhere shouted, "Xu Ying is over there!"
Xu Ying vaulted into the forest, rolled several times to bleed off the momentum, sprang to his feet, and sprinted downhill.
A short distance away, the snake demon Yuan Qi slithered at top speed, covering his flank.
Boy and serpent encountered every deity that tried to block their path and cut them down in seconds.
Even Yuan Qi had cultivated the Elephant-Force Ox-Demon Fist to the peak of the fifth tier. His signature move—the White Elephant Swinging Its Trunk—executed with his tail, was so fast that the tip broke the sound barrier, often winning in a single strike.
Of course, if the first strike failed, Yuan Qi was in real danger. He was a serpent, with no limbs to execute the full repertoire of the Elephant-Force Ox-Demon Fist.
But with Xu Ying watching his back, any missed strike was answered immediately by the boy’s follow-up attack.
The sun rose. The Nether River vanished entirely. The black bear stood at the cave mouth, gazing into the distance, and saw deities flitting through the forest in pursuit of a single target.
That direction held a place where the sun’s essence blazed with unusual intensity. The sunlight there grew so concentrated that, from a distance, luminous particles in the air formed two swirling vortexes—one large, one small.
That was where Xu Ying and Yuan Qi sprinted forward, fought off pursuers, and inhaled and exhaled, refining away impurities, bolstering their qi and blood, accelerating their bodies’ recovery.
Xiong Qianli murmured, "King Xu, Seven-Brother—may you both find your way safely."
Xu Ying and Yuan Qi ran more than ten li, plunging deep into the left bank of the Nether River and entering the mountain range of the underworld.
Those ten li had been covered in ten li of fighting, and only then had they shaken off their pursuers.
New wounds lined their bodies, but they did not resume their Guiding Art cultivation. Here, even the sunlight felt cold, stripped of warmth. If they activated the Guiding Art now, they would draw in nothing but frigid, chaotic energy that would freeze their blood. Far from enhancing their cultivation, it would wreak havoc on their bodies.
The underworld mountains were grim and terrifying. Their stone was pitch-black, and on some cliffs a thick, black ichor oozed down—its nature unknown.
Xu Ying held the great bell aloft in his right hand and walked on. Below a cliff, bones were stacked into a road. Following that bone-road to its end, he saw a house.
The house was built of bones laid as bricks, with human skin hung as banners and skulls carved into ornamental fixtures.
A cold wind stirred the skin banners, on which characters were written: "Tavern."