Sudden Slaughter

Beast Spirit Immortal City was in the midst of a celebration welcoming honored guests. Everyone was beaming with joy and high spirits.

The Black Clan's collateral-branch Golden Cores were excited, overjoyed. A long-cherished wish of who knew how many years was about to be fulfilled today.

Many Golden Core cultivators' eyes grew moist as they recalled the past.

In their youth, they had paid the Blood Tax every year. The children they bore died one after another, sent into the Blood Pool, their flesh and souls becoming nourishment for the direct lineage's talents. No collateral-branch cultivator with outstanding aptitude was ever permitted to emerge.

Whenever a child with a Heavenly Spirit Root or mutant spirit root appeared, the direct lineage's envoys would immediately find them, delirious with joy, and claim them as part of their own merit.

This was a pain buried deep in the heart of every collateral-branch cultivator.

Whether they were Qi Refining cultivators, Foundation Establishment cultivators, or lofty Golden Core Peak cultivators, from the age of sixteen to thirty, they had to bear children without pause, then personally send the infants in swaddling clothes into the Blood Pool, fulfilling the harsh clan rules laid down by the Lineage.

Failure meant death.

These were things teenage boys and girls had endured, not those hard-hearted old cultivators centuries later.

Such scars were destined never to be forgotten.

When the Great Sun Sect appeared, vast numbers of collateral branches from the Northern Plains Families had joined them without hesitation. They turned and fought the Righteous and Demonic Alliance, forming the backbone of the Great Sun Sect's cultivators. They were even more frenzied and reckless than the Great Sun Sect cultivators themselves; Golden Core self-detonations were a common sight, and they had rendered indelible merit.

"Everything... is over now..."

A middle-stage