The Old Poison Creature taught Lu Xiaotian how to deal with the poisonous miasma, while Ying Gou taught him how to deal with the bone claws.
After absorbing the miasma from two more locations in succession, Lu Xiaotian had gained some experience in collecting it.
Lu Xiaotian found that whether he used the Old Poison Creature's method or Ying Gou's, it wasn't easy to break the bone claws formed by the miasma. Combining the two methods, however, made the task twice as effective with half the effort.
But to avoid alerting Ying Gou, Lu Xiaotian hadn't used his full strength.
After realizing that the Hall Master of the Qilin Soul Hall—or some of the other pill spirits—was under Ying Gou's control, Lu Xiaotian stopped rushing to collect the miasma. Instead, he pressed steadily forward without haste.
When they finally broke through the last area surrounded by poisonous miasma, a sudden surge of corpse aura erupted from the miasma node.
"Corpse aura formed from soul corpses!" Lu Xiaotian's heart jumped, and he retreated some distance.
"What's going on?" Yan Bei, Scorpion Fiend, and the others all fell back.
Hun Yong, Tu Ling, and the others, who had been keeping the Hall Master of the Qilin Soul Hall under constant watch, were also startled. With their keen eyes, they could tell where the corpse aura came from. It had most likely been formed from the soul corpses they had killed earlier.
"So this is how the Thousand-Leaf Soul-Scale Heaven-Swallowing Formation expands outward." Seeing the formation patterns flicker amid the roiling corpse aura, Lu Xiaotian immediately understood what Ying Gou had meant earlier.
With Ying Gou absent, it would have been impossible for the few Golden Immortal-level pill spirits, including the Hall Master of the Qilin Soul Hall, to cause such a commotion.