Li Qingshan encountered no resistance along the way.
He walked into Pinewind Abbey.
The air was thick with the stench of blood.
Yet there were no corpses in sight.
The Man-Eating Gu had devoured them all, leaving nothing behind.
An elder of Pinewind Abbey, struggling desperately to suppress the Man-Eating Gu and Qi-Blood Gu, heard footsteps.
His eyes flew open.
When he saw Li Qingshan,
his pupils instantly contracted.
"It... it was you pulling the strings behind all this? You little bastard!"
At those words, Li Qingshan
frowned slightly.
"What a filthy mouth."
He muttered the words.
With a sweep of his sleeve, countless more Gu insects flew out and engulfed the elder in an instant. Before the elder could even scream, he had been reduced to a stark white skeleton.
Li Qingshan continued forward.
Soon, he reached the main hall of Pinewind Abbey. Before it stood a pool filled with black water.
Several of Pinewind Abbey's standard elder robes floated in the pool.
Li Qingshan glanced at them.
Then he raised his gaze.
A trace of gravity flashed through his eyes.
Up in the main hall,
two figures sat cross-legged.
One had white hair and a white beard, deeply sunken eyes, and an old Daoist robe washed almost white.
The other was younger, with a taut face and an old scar on his chin.
A layer of spiritual radiance enveloped each of them.
The Qi-Blood Gu lunging at them struck that radiance, burst with a series of faint cracks, and turned into wisps of blue smoke.
"Innate True Persons."
Li Qingshan spoke quietly.
Had this been a few months earlier,
before he had met Master Gu,
the sight of beings like these
would have left him unable to muster even the thought of resistance.
Now, however, he was about