Yellow Sprout Hidden in the Earth Veins, One Fire Turns It All to Ash

Three days later.

The Li Family had become scorched earth.

The great tomb had burned away. The gray-black soil had been fired into dark red clay, clacking underfoot like dry roof tiles.

Fragments of white bone had burned to pale powder. The wind scattered it everywhere, mingling it with the smell of charring and tightening the throat.

Scarlet Tiger Lord emerged from the ruins. A thin layer of ash coated his crimson-and-gold Daoist robe, and the sparks in his hair were far sparser than when he had arrived.

He stood at the edge of the ruins and looked around. Then he let out a long breath and stretched, his bones cracking.

"Tch. The Dharma Body of the Lady Earth lineage really was tough. Easy to defeat, hard to kill."

He brushed the ash from his clothes. Beating that old ghost had taken a punch and a burst of fire, barely a moment. Uprooting him completely had taken three days and three nights: sealing the earth veins, burning through the rock, and scorching every last inch clean.

He was dead tired.

He looked down at his hand. A trace of dark yellow aura still lingered on his knuckles, faint but stubborn. He was about to evaporate it with fire when he stopped.

The aura had not dispersed.

Not only had it remained, it was pulsing. Like a seed buried in the soil, watered by spring rain, it seemed ready to sprout.

Scarlet Tiger Lord narrowed his eyes. He stilled his mind and sensed the source of that wisp of aura. He had burned the old ghost clean away, without leaving even a thought behind.

The aura had seeped up from deep underground. It was as though something had been roused by his destruction of the death qi.

He crouched and pressed