A Powerful Enemy Returns

The members of the Death River Cult divided their cultivation of the Great Dao of Death into five levels.

The first level was the death of the physical body. When form withered into ashes and vitality faded into spiritual extinction, for most living beings in this world, at the moment their bodies died, all intangible things—the soul, consciousness, wisdom, thought, and more—would perish along with them.

Unless one cultivated to the Golden Core realm and transferred one's consciousness into spiritual energy, from mayflies born in the morning and dead by evening to Foundation Establishment True Persons who enjoyed two hundred years of longevity, all would die completely the moment their physical bodies perished.

The second level was the annihilation of the soul. Mortals possessed dull spiritual awareness, their souls remaining indistinct. Even Foundation Establishment Cultivators, who could be likened to Yin Spirits manifesting in the world, could not fundamentally escape the physical body. Even ghosts relied on the Earthly Yin Sha of a particular place to exist and were greatly restricted by worldly laws. Only cultivators who had transferred their consciousness into spiritual energy, or Innate Strange Species, could abandon their bodies and survive—such as Golden Core and Nascent Soul cultivators, or Asura, Celestial Human, and other foreign races.

To kill them completely, one had to not only destroy the physical body in which they existed, but also erase the divine soul formed from spiritual energy tainted by their aura. Otherwise, they were highly likely to seize another body and be reborn, or reincarnate and return, which was equivalent to provoking an undying enemy.

The first two methods were commonly used in the cultivation world to eliminate enemies: grinding bones to dust and scattering ashes, reducing souls to scattered fragments. They could make more than ninety-nine percent of the cultivators