The Great Demon of Slaughter and the Buddhist Chant

The City-Slaughtering Great Demon and a Buddhist Chant.

For cultivators, it was no more than a brief meditation session.

For Li Mingyuan at that moment, those three double-hours were a humiliation unlike any he had suffered since stepping onto the great path of the Golden Core.

The vaunted Soul-Chasing Seal of the Ten Thousand Soul Hall had actually been wiped clean in less than a quarter of an hour!

That feeling was no different from someone slapping him hard across the face right in front of him.

The leisurely state of mind he had originally held while hunting down the killer had long since been burned away by towering rage.

The escape-light beneath his feet was no leisurely stroll through a courtyard; it had turned into a black streak of light that tore across the sky, its speed rising again and again!

The wild wind howled beside his ears, yet it could not carry away even half a trace of the icy baleful aura around him.

Blackstone City had arrived!

Li Mingyuan's figure hovered above the city, and his Golden Core divine sense spread out like a boundless great net, instantly enveloping the entire city.

A faint trace of spell-combat aura still lingered in the air.

His gaze locked precisely onto the seventh-layer Qi Refining cultivator inside the City Lord's Estate, who had been frightened by his Golden Core pressure into lying on the ground, trembling.

"You. Come here."

His voice was not loud, yet it carried an irresistible demonic force.

Inside the City Lord's Estate, Li Song only felt his body stiffen before he flew up out of his own control, hovering in utter terror before Li Mingyuan.

"S-Senior, spare my life!"

Li Mingyuan did not even look at him. His withered palm pressed directly onto the crown of Li Song's head.

Soul search.

A few breaths later, Li Song's soul turned into green smoke and scattered into the air.

Li Mingyuan's expression darkened to the extreme.

Three figures.

One had a decayed aura, an old ghost who cultivated the blood path.

One had a calm aura, like a righteous-path cultivator.

And the last... wore a mask, had a thin build, and even his aura was blurred and indistinct—a rat hiding its head and showing its tail.

It was the masked one who had killed him!

Li Mingyuan could even sense the sharpness and resolve of that sword strike from Li Song's fragmented memories.

"Good. Very good. To think he dared to kill so brazenly despite knowing the man was a disciple of my Ten Thousand Soul Hall. He truly doesn't put my Ten Thousand Soul Hall in his eyes."

Anger pushed him to laughter. With a flicker of his body, he followed the direction Zhao Hao had first left in, turned into a black rainbow, and vanished into the horizon in an instant.

However, one double-hour later, after Li Mingyuan had carefully searched an area of more than fifteen hundred li and failed to find so much as a single hair, he finally realized that he had been played.

That masked brat had been misleading him from the very beginning!

"Ah—! Damned junior!"

His impotent fury turned into a roar that resounded through the clouds.

His figure abruptly turned back, and at an even faster speed than when he had come, he reappeared above Blackstone City.

"If I can't find you, then I'll have you bear the karma of this entire city!"

The third-rank magic treasure in his hand, the Ten Thousand Soul Banner, unfurled in the wind. In an instant, black clouds pressed down upon the city, and ghosts wept as spirits howled.

Tens of thousands of living souls were forcibly stripped from their bodies, turning into wailing streams of light that were all sucked into the Ten Thousand Soul Banner.

Within the time it took an incense stick to burn, Blackstone City became a true city of the dead.

After doing all this, Li Mingyuan's rage did not subside in the slightest.

Instead, he chased in the direction Wu Tang and Sun Ze had fled.

This time, he did not come up empty-handed again.

Half a day later, two souls turned into flying ash in his palm.

"Ten Thousand Immortal City..."

"Wearing a mask..."

"Surnamed Zhao?"

Li Mingyuan murmured to himself, cruel mockery flickering in his sinister eyes.

His figure disappeared once more. This time, he headed straight west toward Ten Thousand Immortal City.

At the same time, a hundred li outside Blackstone City, deep underground, seven li below the surface.

Zhao Hao was like a lifeless stone, perfectly merged with the surrounding earth and rock.

He had completely sealed off his five senses, cut off all connection with the outside world, and entered a profound and mysterious state of turtle-breathing.

Here, it was as if the concept of time passing did not exist.

He did not know that less than half a day after he entered this state, a violent Golden Core divine sense swept across the ground above his head like a devastating storm.

That divine sense was incomparably tyrannical, plunging five li deep underground and turning over every inch of that mountain range, yet in the end, it still failed to reach the divine-sense forbidden zone seven li below.

But a depth of seven li was already a forbidden zone for the divine sense of Golden Core cultivators.

A calamity great enough to grind him into dust brushed past him in this unknowing silence.

He did not know that a bloody massacre sweeping across tens of thousands of li was rising because of him.

On the road west, Li Mingyuan was like a walking god of death.

The first to suffer was the mortal city, "Moon-Gazing City."

Li Mingyuan descended, the Ten Thousand Soul Banner unfurled, and in less than the time it took an incense stick to burn, all one hundred thousand living beings in the city were turned into wailing fodder inside the banner.

The second was a cultivation clan within the sphere of influence of Thousand Buddha Temple: Li Family Fort.

The Li family's old ancestor was only at the Foundation Establishment Middle Stage. Before Li Mingyuan, the clan-protecting grand array was like a thin sheet of paper, shattering with a casual strike of his hand.

From Foundation Establishment elders above to mortal servants below, more than three thousand mouths—none were spared.

The vicious name of the "city-destroying great demon" spread madly through the borderlands between Thousand Buddha Temple and Ten Thousand Soul Hall like the most poisonous plague.

Panic bred in the hearts of every cultivator.

In just ten short days.

Li Mingyuan slaughtered seven cities and two market towns in succession. The ghost qi on the Ten Thousand Soul Banner in his hand had already grown dense to a terrifying degree, faintly showing signs of advancing to mid-grade third rank.

And his own Killing Intent had also climbed to a peak.

On this day, he descended above a large market town named "Anyang."

This was the last decent gathering place of cultivators along the route he had deduced.

He was certain that the brat surnamed Zhao had to be somewhere along the way—perhaps he had long since become a dead soul within his Ten Thousand Soul Banner.

The slaughter at this moment was nothing more than continuing to vent his anger at being toyed with, as well as upholding the mindset of, since he had already come, he might as well reap some gains before leaving!

Li Mingyuan had long since grown too lazy to search any further. He enjoyed the terrified, despairing expressions of countless cultivators below and decided to savor this feast of slaughter in the most direct way.

He raised the Ten Thousand Soul Banner in his hand.

Ghostly shadows that blotted out the sky and covered the sun, accompanied by shrieks that pierced the soul, poured down like a black flood from a breached dike!

At this moment, when a thousand jun hung by a single hair.

A calm, distant Buddhist chant, yet one that rang clearly in the depths of everyone's heart, pierced through all the wailing of ghosts and howling of wolves.

"Amitabha."

The instant the voice fell, a warm golden light lit up on the western horizon.

That golden light was like the first ray of dawn, instantly piercing through the heavy ghost qi that shrouded the entire city!

Under the radiance of the golden light, those hideous ghostly shadows were like piled snow meeting a blazing sun; they let out shrill screams and melted, collapsing one after another.

Li Mingyuan suddenly raised his head and stared fixedly in the direction from which the golden light had come.

Within the golden light, a young monk draped in a plain gray kasaya and holding a string of bodhi prayer beads had appeared out of nowhere ten li in front of him at some unknown time.

The monk's face was solemn, his sacred bearing majestic, yet his eyes were as bright as stars in the heavens.

Facing Li Mingyuan, he kept one hand behind his back and raised the other upright before him in a palm salute. His voice was not loud, but it carried an unquestionable meaning.

"Benefactor, lay down the butcher's knife, and the shore is at your back."