Heaven Devouring Demon Art

"What do we do next? Keep watching him?"

Seeing Zhou Yi's expression flicker uncertainly, Lao Bai scratched at his ears and cheeks as he urged him.

"Once that bastard finds the Azure Sky King's secret manual, you and I can join forces and ambush him from the shadows. Wouldn't that be as easy as taking something from our pockets? Or you could just poison him beforehand and leave him half dead. That would be even safer!"

An Innate Grandmaster was the ultimate dream of every martial artist. Even Lao Bai, who usually treated everything as no big deal, could not escape the common fate.

The Azure Sky King's rise to prominence had long been spread throughout the martial world. Before thirty, he had been utterly obscure. After obtaining a divine art, he had reached the Innate realm within ten years.

Martial Grandmaster, Jiangnan Alliance Lord—his power had soared to the heavens, unmatched for a time. Other things, like beauties and gold and silver, were merely incidental.

"Are you stupid?"

Zhou Yi pointed at his uniform. "I'm a prison guard. Why would I need to follow behind his ass?"

"That's true!"

Lao Bai suddenly understood. Watching Zhou Yi head toward Cell Block One, he dearly wanted to ask what the divine art was called, yet feared losing one of his few remaining friends.

Cell Block One.

It was empty and deserted, every corner spotless.

After the prison break that night, the Brocade Guard had thoroughly searched this cell. They had scraped three layers off even the walls.

"Something even the Brocade Guard could not find... Is that man merely trying his luck, or does he truly know something?"

Zhou Yi had seen the Azure Sky King's miserable state. More than half the bones and tendons in his body had been broken. He needed someone to feed him even when eating, so he could not leave the refined-steel torture rack.

He probed every part of the rack with inner energy, including the shackles and iron chains. All of them were solid refined steel.

There were no lack of inner-energy experts among the Brocade Guard. They had surely examined this place as well. The Azure Sky King would not have hidden his inheritance so simply.

"There must be some method outsiders cannot search for..."

A flash of inspiration suddenly crossed Zhou Yi's mind. He placed his palm against the torture rack and sent inner energy into it according to the secret art of voice transmission.

"Heaven Devouring Demon Art!"

The Azure Sky King's voice suddenly sounded beside his ear, followed by a mantra of more than three thousand words. It taught how to devour others' inner energy, then fuse and refine it for one's own use.

It contained a method for breaking through to the Innate realm. It was exceedingly simple and brutal, without any profound or mysterious subtleties.

Five hundred years of inner energy—once circulated, it could forcibly draw upon the primordial energy of heaven and earth, allowing one to naturally advance into the Innate realm!

At the end, the Azure Sky King earnestly warned, "The mixed inner energies refined by the Heaven Devouring Demon Art are extraordinarily strange. For every five years absorbed, one loses a year of lifespan. If each generation of the clan has top experts, the inheritance may continue unbroken and wealth and glory may never cease. Descendants of the Cang Family must never greedily pursue the Innate realm..."

"No wonder the Azure Sky King was only around fifty, and an Innate Grandmaster at that, yet looked like an old man on the verge of death!"

After hearing the entire technique, Zhou Yi used the voice transmission secret art again. Sure enough, the Azure Sky King's voice sounded once more.

Listening carefully, the later voice seemed somewhat quieter.

"That bastard must be a descendant of the Azure Sky King. If he cannot find the demon art, he will surely cause trouble."

Zhou Yi pondered for a moment. Safety came first in all matters. The other man had risked his life to retrieve his family's inheritance, so Zhou Yi might as well go with the current and send it along.

Harmony brought wealth!

Returning to Cell Block Six, Zhou Yi found Lao Bai squatting in a corner, sighing mournfully.

"Which girl are you thinking about this time?"

What Zhou Yi had heard most over this period was Lao Bai boasting about the beauties of the martial world—the sixth-ranked beauty on the Rouge List, an otherworldly female sword immortal, the legitimate young lady of one of the Jiangnan Aristocratic Families...

Only after hearing it enough did he understand: Lao Bai had not entered the Heavenly Prison to suffer. He was more likely hiding from romantic debts!

"I'm reminiscing about old friends."

Lao Bai theatrically raised a hand, his eyes deep and dreamy, and sang one of the strange songs he had learned from Zhou Yi. "Friend, oh friend..."

Zhou Yi cut off Lao Bai's absurd antics. "Stop! Do you want to know the Azure Sky King's cultivation art?"

"Old Zhou, you'll tell me?"

Lao Bai's figure flashed, leaving several afterimages in the air. In the blink of an eye, he landed before the cell door.

Zhou Yi said, "This technique is called the Heaven Devouring Demon Art. It can devour and refine others' inner energy. As for the specific method..."

"Hiss! It truly is a demon art. No wonder the Azure Sky King became a grandmaster in ten years!"

Lao Bai sucked in a cold breath and waved his hand. "Knowing the name is enough. I can use it to brag to people in the future. Whatever you do, don't tell me the contents, or I might not be able to stop myself from practicing it."

"You mean bragging to women, right?"

Zhou Yi looked at him with contempt, though inwardly he could not help feeling envious. The Longevity Dao Fruit had no beautifying effect, and his appearance remained utterly ordinary.

"This technique has another flaw. Absorbing five years of inner energy costs one year of lifespan. You age before you grow old. Even the Azure Sky King, at the grandmaster realm, could not reverse it."

"Then I definitely can't practice it! Being strong is only for a moment, but being handsome is for a lifetime!"

Lao Bai pointed to his own face. "We survive in the martial world not because we can fight. Just with this face, how many crises have I crossed? That day at the Prince's Manor, hundreds of swords were pointed at me, yet in the end it was the princess herself who came to my rescue..."

"..."

Unable to bear that bastard's smugness, Zhou Yi picked up a bucket and fled.

In the blink of an eye, another month passed.

After obtaining the Heaven Devouring Demon Art, Zhou Yi did not rush to cultivate it. He continued secretly observing that man's movements.

Early one morning.

Zhou Yi came to the Heavenly Prison to report for duty and discovered Imperial Guards standing watch outside while the Brocade Guard searched within.

"Old Zhou, someone escaped from prison last night. I heard someone killed a prisoner and disguised himself to take his place."

Feng Qiao lowered his voice. "Colonel Lu accepted silver from Clerk Xiao of the Ministry of Justice and interrogated that prisoner in the middle of the night. He had wanted to cripple the man and leave him half dead, but who would have thought he was an expert!"

Colonel Lu's neck was broken on the spot. The prisoner slaughtered his way out of the cells and fled without a trace.

"This..."

For a moment, Zhou Yi did not know what to say. From the perspective of a colleague, he should sympathize, but wantonly torturing prisoners also seemed wrong.

Unspoken rules were merely unspoken rules. Anyone who truly regarded them as right could only be said to have a rotten heart!

"When we go pay our respects later, let's give some extra condolence money."

Zhou Yi received no inspection when entering the prison. The Brocade Guard did not care about a mere food-delivery guard, especially one who had been delivering prison meals for fifteen or sixteen years.

The matter was ultimately dropped. The criminal had used disguise techniques, and even his original face and age were unknown. Naturally, no wanted notice could be issued.

Martial-world toughs breaking the law had always been a great plague upon the Fengyang Kingdom.

Shenjing and the surrounding capital region were already considered stable. In the provincial regions, martial experts occupied territory everywhere. The strong ones were like the Azure Sky King, who had ravaged Jiangnan for more than a decade. The weak ones ran rampant through villages and towns, bullying merchants and tyrannizing the countryside.

Martial cultivation required vast amounts of silver and time. Ordinary people could not even enter through the door. Thus, after suffering exploitation and oppression, they did not even possess the right to rage as common men.

The gap in strength between martial artists and common people was not quite the difference between immortals and mortals, but neither was it something three or five people could resist!

"In an extraordinary world, class divisions only become more rigid. People can see only the splendor above, never the misery at the bottom."

Zhou Yi was no saint who carried the world in his heart. He merely sighed over it before heading to Cell Block One. Using the secret art to examine the torture pillar, he found that the Azure Sky King's voice had indeed vanished completely.

"The final karmic entanglement within this prison has been settled. It is time to return to the quietness of old."

While delivering meals these past days, Zhou Yi had secretly investigated the prisoners. Which had abundant inner energy, which would soon head to the execution ground, which had no sect or school backing them outside.

If others obtained the Heaven Devouring Demon Art, cautious ones would quietly raise people to cultivate inner energy, while radical ones would recklessly devour martial-world experts. The former advanced slowly, while the latter were hunted down.

Whether cautious or reckless, according to the laws of the martial world, those who cultivated demon arts never came to a good end.

Zhou Yi, however, was different. The Heavenly Prison was full of martial-world experts. All he needed to do was choose suitable targets to devour!

After careful selection, he chose a first-rate expert named Yu Sheng.

Yu Sheng could be called a martial-world legend who had risen from nothing. In his youth, he loved fighting and violence. After reaching adulthood, he turned to robbery and plunder. He neither gambled nor visited brothels with the silver he acquired, spending all of it on martial cultivation.

Because his talent was above average, he quickly gained a name in the martial world. People called him Blood Sabre.

Walk by the river often enough, and how could your shoes not get wet? In the end, he fell into a Brocade Guard trap and was thrown into the Heavenly Prison to await execution after autumn.

"Dead early or dead late, death is still death. Rather than be executed on the scaffold, why not trade your inner energy for a meal of wine and meat? That's reasonable, isn't it?"

Zhou Yi pressed his palm against the prisoner's Dantian. The man's inner energy poured out like floodwaters through opened gates, flowing entirely into Zhou Yi's body along his meridians.

The prisoner suffered unbearable agony. His entire body convulsed, but he could not make a sound. Only when his Dantian shattered and his meridians severed did he die.

"About seven or eight years of inner energy. Quite a bit was lost along the way, but the Heavenly Prison has no shortage of martial-world experts!"

Zhou Yi felt the inner energy within his Dantian. It had become more than fifty percent stronger.

No wonder so many people enjoyed cultivating demon arts. The feeling of gaining without labor truly was rather delightful!

"Two years shaved off my lifespan..."

Zhou Yi carefully sensed himself and discovered subtle changes in his internal organs. They could be described as maturing, or as aging.

The Longevity Dao Fruit, which had shown no movement for more than ten years, trembled slightly for an instant. His aged organs returned to their original state.

"So this is the true way to use the Longevity Dao Fruit: cultivating demonic and evil techniques that burn lifespan in exchange for rapid progress!"

Zhou Yi muttered to himself. Ignoring the dead prisoner curled up in the corner, he leisurely headed to the next cell.

Few prisoners in the Heavenly Prison survived until their execution date. After death, their identities were verified, but no one pursued the cause of death. Such matters were difficult to investigate and could not be investigated. Who knew whether tracing them to the source would lead back to His Majesty himself?

Devouring inner energy was only the first step of the demon art. Afterward, it still needed time to be refined and fused.

Zhou Yi was not in a hurry. No matter how slowly he fused the inner energy, it was still more than a hundred times faster than cultivating the Origin Returning Art.

Another characteristic of the Heaven Devouring Demon Art pleased Zhou Yi greatly: before becoming an Innate Grandmaster, there were basically no bottlenecks. One merely needed to find enough sources of inner energy and spend time and effort refining and fusing them.

Five hundred years of inner energy, and Innate would form on its own!

The Origin Returning Art and Five Tiger Strength Fist he had cultivated before—one internal and one external—were both upright and orthodox techniques. Leaving aside the speed of advancement, their many major and minor bottlenecks gave Zhou Yi terrible headaches.

For example, moving from externally tempering sinews and bones to internally refining the organs—Zhou Yi had pondered and studied it alone for a full five years before barely entering the door.

Martial cultivation required techniques, talent, resources, and guidance from famous masters. Not one could be lacking. After all, human lifespans were limited. One could not forcibly grind through bottlenecks simply by relying on time.

"Five hundred years of inner energy would require roughly eighty or ninety people..."

Zhou Yi looked at the prisoners in the A-block cells as though they were fat pigs awaiting slaughter.

"From now on, I should treat them better. They can't keep drinking swill. If they become weak and frail and their inner energy disperses, wouldn't that be a loss!"

From then on.

The prisoners of the A-block cells began drinking thick porridge. They could even see bits of meat in it, and naturally they were endlessly grateful to Zhou Yi.

Autumn, the seventh year of Hongchang.

Zhou Yi entered the kitchen to fetch meal buckets and found Chef Liu had prepared a food box, instructing him to deliver it to Cell Block Nine.

"Which young master has been thrown in this time?"

Zhou Yi was no longer surprised by this. Over more than ten years, he had seen countless playboy scions. They treated entering the Heavenly Prison like a holiday trip; some even took pride in it.

If a young master in Shenjing had never stayed in Cell Block Nine and enjoyed the Heavenly Prison's special treatment, he could not be considered among the highest-ranking nobles.

Chef Liu lowered his voice. "I heard he's from a branch of the Li family. As for what he did, I didn't dare ask!"

There were countless people surnamed Li in Shenjing, and many among them were wealthy and noble. Yet since the Emperor Hongchang ascended the throne, the only family in the capital worthy of being called the Li family was the Great General's Manor.

A relative of Li Wu!