With a single strike, the battle ended, and the black haze filling the sky dispersed.
Qin Zhenggang's arm trembled slightly as he gripped the heavy fire axe. The muscles in his shoulders were taut, and his rough breathing slowly echoed through the empty corpse-burning ground.
That final axe strike had nearly drained more than half of his natal true essence.
Having guarded the Returning Ruins battlefield for years, he understood the pros and cons better than anyone.
The camp's insistence on corpse burning as an ironclad rule had never been pointless fussiness.
Forcibly destroying mutated demonic corpses through brute violence depleted a cultivator's essence. Too many such times would damage one's foundation.
Burning the body in raging fire was a Corpse Purification ritual passed down in the Returning Ruins for ages.
It could completely strip away the foul yin filth clinging to the corpse, send off the lingering breath of fallen cultivators' Remnant Souls, and preserve their last shred of dignity. At the same time, it could eradicate demonic threats at the smallest cost.
Unless absolutely necessary, no one wished to use the brute force of their origin to destroy demonic corpses.
"Keep working. End this quickly."
Qin Zhenggang suppressed the churning blood and qi within him and gave the order in a deep voice. After this mutation, none of them dared slack off in the slightest.
The remaining corpses had all been saturated to the marrow by Demonic Energy. Their souls had long since been completely crushed by the aura of the inverse path, leaving behind only empty shells, without even a trace of Obsession remaining.
Qin He took over two of them. Flames gently enveloped the bodies, slowly cleansing away layer upon layer of demonic filth. The entire process remained calm and uneventful, with no further mutations.
Naturally,