Jiang Ding's divine sense took control of the entire Swamp Demon City, and he quickly gained a general understanding of the situation there.
"The permanent population is 3.47 million, all of them cultivators at the Qi Refining stage or above."
"There are two forces directly under its command. The 100,000-strong Swamp City Guard Army has more than fifty Spirit Transformation cultivators and over ten thousand Nascent Soul Cultivators. The rest are Golden Core cultivators. They're responsible for defending Swamp Demon City."
"The other force is called the Swamp Dark Guard. It consists of dozens of Spirit Transformation cultivators and several thousand Nascent Soul Cultivators. They gather intelligence and carry out personal errands for the Swamp True Venerable: eliminating certain people, collecting living souls to refine the Yin-Yang Tadpoles, harvesting flesh and blood to feed the Jade-Green Toad... Most important of all, they collect sixth-tier heavenly treasures."
"Thanks to Swamp Demon City's vast commercial network, one or two sixth-tier heavenly treasures still turn up every few hundred years. But unlike the two great true sects, it has no steady source of them. It all comes down to luck."
Jiang Ding frowned to himself as he looked over the many places where demonic cultivators gathered in the city.
Quite a few of those cultivators were members of the Swamp Dark Guard. The whole city was a place where filth and corruption festered. Raiding homes, murdering people for their treasures, collecting human souls and flesh for refinement—such things happened often. Chaos ran through its order. The name "Demon City" was no empty boast.
Seen from above with his attention on the whole city, these things struck Jiang Ding even more deeply than they had when he had wandered Swamp Demon City alone. He disliked them all the more.
He could keep such sordid