An Immortal Sword Is Worthless! Crushing an Immortal Sect Blind Box Barehanded

Lu Chen's broad right hand suddenly clenched inward.

The Ultimate Dao Furnace within him spun to its limit, his blood and qi boiling completely.

The mid-grade flying sword lodged in his chest trembled violently. The dark-red true essence glow clinging to its blade flickered madly, trying to slice through Lu Chen's palm.

Wild blood and qi surged through the tendons in his arm and flooded straight into all ten fingers.

An ear-piercing screech of metal grinding exploded through the dark forest.

The viscous red glow covering the flying sword's surface let out a strained burst under the crushing pressure of absolute physical strength.

Bang!

That mass of true essence light was crushed out by force.

Without true essence sustaining it, the flying sword rapidly softened beneath the terrifying heat in Lu Chen's palm, becoming a lump of glowing-red scrap iron.

Lu Chen suddenly drove his wrist downward.

A series of crisp metallic twisting sounds rang out.

This mid-grade artifact, bought with more than half the captain's lifetime savings, was bent on the spot into an absurdly obtuse angle. Its blade was completely warped, its spirituality utterly gone.

Lu Chen spread his fingers and casually tossed the lump of scrap metal onto the ground beside him.

The scrap iron smashed into a puddle, sending up a cloud of pungent white smoke.

The captain collapsed limply into the mud.

Using both hands and feet, he desperately scrambled backward, dragging up heaps of foul-smelling leaves.

His retreat had long since been blocked by the enormous City-Guarding Stele.

His back slammed heavily into the rough stone. There was nowhere left to retreat.

"Don't come any closer!"

The captain panted heavily, his voice cracking completely as his lips trembled uncontrollably.

"I'm the personal disciple of an inner sect elder of the Azure Firmament Sword Sect!"

"You can't touch me!"

"If you kill me, the Azure Firmament Sword Sect will hunt you to the ends of the earth! Not just you—everyone connected to you will die!"

Lu Chen remained where he stood, his expression unchanged.

The captain thought the other man feared the sect's name. He hurriedly changed tactics and desperately began promising benefits.

"Let me go! I'll take what happened today to the grave!"

"The City Lord's Manor treasury has mountains of low-grade spirit stones. I'll give you the formation token! They'll all be yours!"

"Your body is powerful. I can recommend you to enter the inner sect as a guest elder!"

"With me as your guarantor, you'll be an immortal cultivator from now on. You won't have to remain a mortal in the outer city!"

Lu Chen said nothing.

He raised his right arm high, his broad palm whipping up an exceptionally piercing gale as it cut through the air.

His palm came straight down at the captain's chest.

"My martial uncle is—"

The rest of his plea was completely choked off in his throat.

Lu Chen's palm struck squarely into the center of the captain's chest.

The violent force pierced his defenseless body, traveling along his breastbone directly into his heart meridians.

An exceptionally dull crack of shattering bones rang out.

His heart meridians were severed on the spot by that immense force, and the captain's life was utterly destroyed in an instant.

His mouth hung wide open. Before he could even draw his final breath, his head dropped heavily.

His entire body crumpled into the bloody water.

The main conflict ended at that moment.

Lu Chen stood amid several corpses.

His chest heaved violently a few times as he forcibly suppressed the surging Ultimate Dao blood and qi within him.

The metallic patterns over his iron-gray skin gradually faded, and the roiling heat dispersed along with them.

Lu Chen opened his mouth and exhaled a breath of scorching turbid air.

It turned into a cloud of white mist in the damp, chilly night wind.

His killing stance was released.

He strode over to the corpses of the other four disciples.

With brisk movements, he tore the storage bags from their waists.

He piled all five storage bags atop the broad base of the City-Guarding Stele.

Faint formation light flickered over the storage bags' surfaces.

Immortal cultivators needed to inject spiritual energy into such items and slowly erase the divine sense restrictions upon them.

If they were forcibly damaged, the spatial formations within the bags would collapse, and spatial turbulence would grind every item inside into powder.

Lu Chen had no spiritual energy.

He raised both hands and directly grabbed one of the storage bags.

The Ultimate Dao Furnace activated once more.

Scalding blood and qi passed through his palms and directly blanketed the bag's surface.

Lu Chen exerted force with both hands, his five fingers suddenly tightening inward.

The formation restriction on the bag shattered on the spot.

The out-of-control spatial turbulence tore wildly through the confined space, trying to shred Lu Chen's flesh.

Those spatial fragments, which could easily tear apart low-grade artifacts, left only shallow white marks when they cut across the skin and flesh strengthened by Lu Chen's eleventh-layer Iron Cloth Shirt.

Lu Chen snorted coldly, and the force of blood and qi in his palm pressed down without restraint.

Pure brute force locked those invisible currents in place and ground them flat by force.

Bang!

The storage bag was crushed apart on the spot.

Shredded pieces of cloth flew everywhere.

A pile of miscellaneous objects, freed from the formation's restraints, fell straight onto the stele's base.

Without stopping, Lu Chen grabbed the remaining four bags and crushed them one by one.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Four successive explosions echoed across the clearing.

A small mountain of spoils instantly piled up atop the stele's base.

Lu Chen rummaged through the heap of miscellaneous items.

Large numbers of low-grade spirit stones the size of fingernails rolled across the ground, giving off faint spiritual light.

More than a dozen jade slips containing cultivation methods lay scattered about.

Several sets of brand-new Azure Firmament Sword Sect outer sect robes were piled to one side.

Dozens of white jade porcelain bottles of varying sizes rolled everywhere.

Lu Chen did not even spare those jade-slip cultivation methods a glance.

He could not use spiritual energy at all. Immortal cultivators' cultivation methods were completely useless to him.

His attention was drawn to several darker, larger stones.

Five mid-grade spirit stones.

They felt heavy in his hand, brimming with exceptionally dense spiritual energy.

Lu Chen tried clenching a spirit stone.

His Ultimate Dao blood and qi instinctively repelled it, firmly blocking the spiritual energy trying to enter through his pores at the surface of his body.

They truly could not be used for cultivation.

Unwilling to accept it, Lu Chen pressed his five fingers into the spirit stone's surface.

The enormous force of his grip squeezed several cracks into the mid-grade spirit stone.

A strange reaction occurred.

The dense spiritual energy leaking out came into contact with the high-temperature blood and qi at Lu Chen's fingertips and was immediately forcefully ignited.

This was not ordinary fire.

It was a pure conversion of energy.

The spiritual glow on the mid-grade spirit stone's surface rapidly dimmed. The entire stone began radiating astonishing heat, becoming scorching hot.

Lu Chen weighed the heated stone in his hand a few times.

This thing could be used perfectly well to ward off cold and keep warm.

He tucked all five heated mid-grade spirit stones into his clothes, saving them for A-Nan.

Then he crouched down and began examining the white jade porcelain bottles.

He pulled out their stoppers and held them beneath his nose for a sniff.

After searching through more than ten bottles in succession, he finally found two bottles of healing pills.

He poured out two brown pellets the size of longans and placed them in his palm.

The healing medicine used by the lowest ranks of the immortal sects was mixed with a large amount of potent herbs for the sake of rapid effects, and contained considerable pill toxins.

If mortals swallowed them directly, the medicinal force would absolutely burn through their stomachs and intestines.

Lu Chen closed his palm.

The Ultimate Dao Furnace ran at full speed within his body.

Violent blood and qi passed through his skin and drilled directly into the pills.

The brown color on the pills' surfaces rapidly faded.

The violent spiritual energy and harmful pill toxins were forcibly stripped away beneath the repeated grinding of Ultimate Dao blood and qi.

They turned into wisps of pungent black smoke that drifted into the air through the gaps between his fingers.

In less than half a breath's time.

The two brown pills became crystalline, pure pellets that gave off a gentle medicinal fragrance.

Lu Chen clenched the purified healing pills in his hand and turned toward the cave.

The cave entrance was still sealed tightly by the massive stele, leaving only a gap half a foot wide.

He turned sideways and squeezed through that extremely narrow gap.

Deep within the cave, A-Nan lay quietly atop a smooth, dry boulder.

She was wrapped tightly in thick Netherwind Wolf hide, with only her pale little face exposed.

Lu Chen walked over and bent close to examine her condition.

The little girl's high fever had completely subsided.

Her brows, once tightly furrowed from intense pain, had now fully relaxed.

Her breathing was steady, her chest rising and falling evenly and rhythmically.

A faint layer of warm, jade-like radiance glimmered over her pale skin.

The transformation of her jade bones had initially stabilized.

Lu Chen turned around and walked to a hollow in the corner of the cave.

There was a pool of clean underground spring water gathered there.

He crouched down and submerged both large hands in the water.

Carefully washing away the bloodstains and mud clinging to his skin.

He scrubbed them over and over, only returning to the boulder after confirming that not even the slightest scent of blood remained on his palms or beneath his fingernails.

Lu Chen placed the two purified healing pills into a small wooden bowl.

He poured in some spring water.

The pills dissolved as soon as they touched the water, turning into a bowl of medicinal liquid with a delicate fragrance.

He extended his left hand, moving with utmost gentleness, and slipped it beneath A-Nan's head to lift her slightly.

Holding the wooden bowl in his right hand, he brought it to her lips.

"Drink the medicine."

Lu Chen spoke two words.

Smelling the medicinal fragrance, the sleeping A-Nan instinctively opened her mouth and swallowed the gentle medicinal liquid bit by bit.

After feeding her the medicine, Lu Chen set down the wooden bowl.

He took the five mid-grade spirit stones, still continuously giving off heat, from his clothes.

He lifted a corner of the wolf hide and very carefully placed the heated spirit stones beneath A-Nan.

Having done all that, Lu Chen sat cross-legged beside her once more.

Time passed.

The night outside gradually faded.

At the farthest edge of the eastern horizon, a trace of gray-white dawn began to spread like the belly of a fish.

The wind stopped.

The morning light dispersed some of the miasma in the forest.

Lu Chen rested with his eyes closed, the blood and qi of his eleventh-layer Iron Cloth Shirt circulating slowly through his body.

Suddenly.

His tightly closed eyes snapped open.

A faint disturbance came from above the towering clouds overhead.

Lu Chen straightened his back and listened intently.

From the depths of the distant sky came a faint, intermittent strain of immortal music.

The sound was ethereal and hollow, carrying a lofty superiority that did not belong to the mortal world of the Nine Provinces.

Lu Chen rose to his feet and looked through a crack in the rock wall toward the whitening sky.

His rough fingers slowly clenched once more.