He compared the various arrays he had stored in his mind over the past three thousand years, one by one, then tried using True Qi to recreate the original beside it. Bai Qiuran stamped his foot, and his body plunged straight into the earth. In the blink of an eye, he had arrived inside the tomb of the sixteenth emperor. This array belonged to the Blood God Sect, one of the most infamous sects among Demonic Cultivators. It was mainly used in conjunction with the Blood God Sect's Blood Coagulation Technique, a vicious technique that could easily congeal all the blood in a cultivator whose cultivation was lower than one's own, killing them. But the technique could also be used on oneself, primarily to fake one's death and escape. After sweeping the area twice, Bai Qiuran noticed something amiss. As expected... the Blood God Sect's Su Blood Array. According to the results of Bai Qiuran's Spiritual Sense scan, eighteen corpses lay sleeping in the mausoleum, while several other tombs were empty, their contents long since eroded by time. His Spiritual Sense settled on the tomb of the sixteenth Shangxuan Emperor. Looks like quite a few of the Yao Mo incidents in Shangxuan Kingdom should be laid at this one's door. He must have taken advantage of the Yao Mo's rampage to fish in troubled waters. What a disgrace. After a cursory look, Bai Qiuran left the Demonic Cultivator's arrangement untouched and withdrew from the tomb. That Demonic Cultivator wasn't here now, so even if he destroyed the arrangement, it would be pointless. Worse, he might alert the enemy and cause more casualties. It was the night before the Heaven Worship Ceremony. Bai Qiuran had walked all the way to the Shangxuan Imperial Mausoleum, a hundred li from the capital of Shangxuan Kingdom. The Su Blood Array was what those Demonic Cultivators used after faking their deaths with the Blood Coagulation Technique, to restore the flow of blood throughout their bodies and awaken themselves. Human blood? The Shangxuan Imperial Mausoleum was heavily guarded by the Imperial Guard. Thousands of soldiers stood in layer upon layer around it, but they were no obstacle to Bai Qiuran. He hadn't even used a spell. Relying only on the Breath Holding Technique and Light Body Cultivation Method, he slipped past the army's watchful eyes and entered the mausoleum without anyone noticing. After reaching the mausoleum, Bai Qiuran first examined the positions and feng shui of the altar and the tombs. Then his Spiritual Sense plunged straight underground, probing the tombs of Shangxuan Kingdom's successive rulers. Bai Qiuran felt a flicker of anger at the scene before him, but after three thousand years of life, he had learned to keep his temper well in hand. Amid a series of sharp cracks, the rivets and mechanisms sealing the stone coffin snapped beneath Bai Qiuran's tremendous strength. The lid flew up and stuck in the layer of earth above the tomb. The blood was fresh; it looked like that Demonic Cultivator had come back and prepared the arrangement not long ago. Bai Qiuran activated Spiritual Vision and saw countless vengeful spirits trapped in the human blood, struggling in agony, bound and suppressed by the array, unable to pass on. He remembered that Shangxuan Kingdom had apparently been founded more than eighteen hundred years into the Dacang Calendar, when he, Bai Qiuran, was around eighteen hundred years old. Inside this mausoleum, the Shangxuan Emperors lay in order of when they had lived, from deepest to shallowest. In the early days, when Shangxuan Kingdom had only just been founded and war and chaos reigned, quite a few emperors had fallen on the battlefield before their bodies could be recovered. Their tombs were therefore only cenotaphs. Bai Qiuran's expression grew intent as he studied the black marks. When his Spiritual Sense had passed over them, they had no lingering energy, so he had assumed they were stains on the yellow brocade. But now, on closer inspection, he realized they might once have been runes forming an array. He walked twice around the stone coffin, searching according to the Blood God Sect's usual practices. Sure enough, in the earth directly beneath the altar, he found the array that the Demonic Cultivator had inscribed in human blood. Bai Qiuran clapped his hands and stood up, his eyes flickering. But this arrangement is so crude, I'm itching to fix it for him. He probably wasn't properly trained in the Blood God Sect. Maybe he got hold of a fragment of a manual and taught himself. In the tombs of the fifteenth, fourteenth, and thirteenth Shangxuan Emperors, the burial goods interred alongside the corpses still retained their clear outlines. Yet the tomb of the sixteenth emperor, who had lived later than them, was completely empty. Or perhaps the current emperor of Shangxuan Kingdom is himself a Demonic Cultivator who practices the Blood God Sect's techniques. Does he want to sacrifice the boys and girls to Heaven to increase his power, or to extend his own life? Whatever the truth, it should be revealed at tomorrow's Heaven Worship Ceremony. Wait, this tomb should at least have some burial goods in it. Hm? What's this? Let's take a look inside. Bai Qiuran waved away the dust and peered into the stone coffin. Sure enough, the coffin lined with yellow brocade was utterly empty. This tomb is empty too? More than three thousand years before Bai Qiuran's birth, the war between the Dao Realm and the Demon Race had just ended, and the Demon Race had withdrawn to the Savage Lands. In the wake of the catastrophe, the Ten Lands of Jiuzhou had abandoned the old calendar and begun using the Dacang Calendar, which was still in use today. After a few simple inquiries, Bai Qiuran had successfully learned the location of the Imperial Mausoleum, a place practically everyone in the capital of Shangxuan Kingdom knew about. He had arrived that very night. With the Azure Nether Sword Sect nearby, the kingdom had lasted an unusually long time. By now, it had a history of around twelve hundred years. Each Shangxuan Emperor had reigned for an average of just over fifty years, which meant that by now, there should have been around twenty-four or twenty-five emperors. After looking twice, Bai Qiuran suddenly noticed some black marks on the yellow brocade. They seemed to have once been some kind of liquid, but had dried into powder. He scraped a little off and held it to his nose. The tomb was completely empty except for a huge stone coffin, and filled with poisonous gases that had accumulated after lying buried underground for countless years. None of that affected Bai Qiuran. As soon as he arrived, he strode toward the coffin and lifted its lid without a trace of mercy. As the burial place of Shangxuan Kingdom's successive rulers, the Imperial Mausoleum had naturally been built on a grand scale. A broad stone-paved avenue, wide enough for four carriages to travel abreast, ran from the entrance into the mausoleum, guarded on either side by rows of Mausoleum Guardian Beasts facing one another. At the end stood the lofty royal altar and the Imperial Mausoleum, beneath which the rulers of Shangxuan Kingdom lay sleeping. The vengeful spirits could be freed later. Tomorrow was the Heaven Worship Ceremony, and Bai Qiuran, as one of the two hundred boys and girls, had decided to prepare a surprise for that Demonic Cultivator—a taste of what those victims had suffered. So there really is a Demonic Cultivator lurking in Shangxuan Kingdom.
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