A Foundation Establishment Old Monster Enters the Wild Forest, the Bloodthirst Compass Points to the Abyss

Immortal-Breaking Mountain's outskirts.

The dull thunder of hooves utterly shattered the forest's natural stillness.

Thirty Black-Iron heavy cavalrymen formed an exceptionally sharp wedge formation and forcibly advanced into the depths of the dense miasma.

The massive armored rhinoceroses strode forward on thick limbs.

Each time their enormous hooves rose and fell, they trampled the thorny shrubs blocking their path straight into sludge.

The gray miasma that lingered year-round was violently blasted apart by the gale of their charge, unable to close back in at all.

Layers of rotting leaves that had accumulated on the ground for centuries, along with the mud beneath them, were brutally crushed and squeezed dry.

Not one of the knights riding those rhinoceroses was an ordinary mortal soldier.

They were all martial cultivators who had achieved minor success in body refinement.

Solid slabs of muscle stretched the half-inch-thick Black-Iron heavy armor taut and full.

The surfaces of the heavy armor were engraved with blast-resistant array patterns meant to withstand the impact of spells.

Even if these thirty heavy cavalrymen faced a volley of fireballs and wind blades from Qi Refinement cultivators, they could withstand it without a scratch.

This was Black Mud City's lord's ultimate trump card, his strongest force for suppressing demon beast riots in the outskirts.

Now, that trump card had been completely deployed.

Directly above the formation.

A purple figure stood atop a top-grade flying sword, hovering steadily in midair and controlling the entire group's pace.

Chen Yuanshan wore a costly purple robe.

A luminous pearl emitting cold white light floated three feet above his head.

Its radiance tore directly through the forest's dim gloom.

This Foundation Establishment Realm retainer of Black Mud City stood with his hands behind his back, making no effort whatsoever to conceal the arrogance on his face.

Chen Yuanshan snorted coldly and flicked away a dead leaf clinging to the hem of his dharma robe.

"If it were not for the secret treasure in that severely wounded Old Devil's hands, would such a godforsaken backwater be worthy of soiling this old man's flying sword?"

The armored cavalrymen below merely lowered their heads and urged their mounts onward. No one dared answer.

Though Chen Yuanshan's face was full of arrogance, his movements atop the flying sword remained exceedingly vigilant.

An old fox who had lived to the Foundation Establishment Realm in the cultivation world never entrusted his life entirely to arrogance.

His right hand held two protective golden-light talismans that could be activated at any moment.

Chen Yuanshan suddenly lowered the altitude of his flying sword.

"Everyone, link your auras! Draw all your magical artifacts!"

The thirty martial cultivators immediately drew the heavy refined-steel horse-chopping sabers hanging at their saddles.

"That old dog from the Blood Demon Sect is best at hiding in the shadows and launching sneak attacks. All of you, keep your hides taut!"

The armored rhinoceroses at the front of the formation suddenly came to a halt.

The massive beast at the very front snorted irritably, its huge hooves scraping uneasily through the muck twice.

The martial cultivator commander leading the group raised his right hand, and the entire wedge formation instantly reined in and stopped short.

In the direction the commander pointed.

At the edge of the foul-smelling swamp ahead lay a mangled corpse.

The corpse had already been half-devoured by demon wolves in the forest. Its chest cavity was completely hollow, its intestines and organs dragged across the ground.

On the few scraps of cloth remaining on the body, the cloud patterns of an outer disciple of the Azure Firmament Sword Sect could still be clearly identified.

Chen Yuanshan controlled his flying sword and swiftly descended until he was less than three feet above the swamp.

He did not land directly, disgustedly releasing a vast sweep of divine sense from a distance toward the mutilated corpse.

His divine sense swept across the ruined torso before finally locking onto the deceased's head, twisted at an extraordinarily bizarre angle.

Chen Yuanshan's murky eyes suddenly widened.

His pupils contracted to pinpoints.

He completely ignored the bite marks left by demon beasts, focusing all his attention on the ghastly white, broken cervical vertebra.

The fracture was incomparably smooth, yet it carried an overwhelmingly brutal violence.

Such a break could never have been caused by a sharp flying sword, much less bear the traces of a wind-blade spell.

There was no residual edge of spiritual-energy cutting whatsoever.

It had been snapped by hand through the sheer force of external sinews—a pure, incomprehensibly immense brute strength.

Chen Yuanshan's fingers unconsciously clenched his sleeve.

His gaze shifted from the broken neck to the muddy water beside the corpse.

There lay a patch of blackened paper ash.

It was the remains of a high-grade defensive talisman issued by the Azure Firmament Sword Sect.

Chen Yuanshan raised his right hand and grabbed through the air.

A strand of true essence wrapped around the ash and carried it into his palm.

He crushed it hard between two fingers, scattering the ashes at once.

The arrogance on Chen Yuanshan's face vanished in an instant, and his scalp went numb.

"Even the spiritual-energy residue in a high-grade defensive talisman was not burned away..."

Even if a high-grade defensive talisman were forcibly shattered by an even stronger spell, the spiritual energy within it would inevitably burn itself out violently.

Yet the spiritual energy in this talisman ash had been directly snuffed out at the instant of eruption by some absolute weight or unreasonable brute force.

For the first time, an indescribable chill rose in Chen Yuanshan's heart.

The common sense of cultivators had been smashed open into a huge gap before this broken vertebra and handful of talisman ash.

He abruptly flicked his sleeve, flinging all the paper ash back into the muddy water.

"Continue advancing!"

The heavy cavalry formation set off again.

After skirting that fetid swamp, the main force had advanced less than two hundred paces when the terrain ahead changed completely.

An extraordinarily exaggerated, unnaturally level trench abruptly stretched across everyone's line of sight.

This was not some wild path trampled out by a handful of people.

It was a massive passage more than two zhang wide, sunk over half a foot into the earth.

The weathered rock layer at its bottom had all been crushed into exceedingly fine stone powder.

Every thorny shrub, every hard old tree root, even the large boulders blocking the way, had been pulverized beneath an irresistible crushing force and rammed directly into the soil.

This trench had been forcibly plowed through Immortal-Breaking Mountain the previous night by Lu Chen as he dragged that thirty-thousand-pound City-Guarding Stele.

The thirty heavy cavalrymen, all of whom had achieved minor success in body refinement, stopped before the trench.

Their thick Adam's apples bobbed with difficulty in the gaps of their Black-Iron armor.

A chorus of swallowing rose through the forest.

These hardened men, accustomed to seeing demon beasts tear flesh apart, felt their throats go dry as they stared at the rocks beneath their feet, ground into powder.

Even the armored rhinoceroses did not dare easily step onto that compacted passage, their hooves slipping repeatedly at its edge.

Chen Yuanshan jumped directly from his flying sword.

His feet landed solidly atop the stone powder at the bottom of the trench.

He did not circulate true essence to protect his body.

He crouched down and pressed his withered palm directly against the compacted earth.

It was unbelievably hard to the touch, more solid than the bluestone slabs of the inner city.

Chen Yuanshan closed his eyes and fully released his divine sense.

The surroundings were utterly clean.

There were no remnants of spell bombardment in the soil, nor was there any scorched stench from detonated arrays.

Chen Yuanshan's breathing began to grow heavy.

An utterly mad conjecture rapidly took shape in his mind.

A great demonic cultivator!

Absolutely the kind of great demonic cultivator capable of shaking mountains barehanded!

He must have used an exceedingly rare mountain-moving secret art, deliberately concealing the fluctuations of his true essence while relying on the crushing weight of a secret treasure to plow through.

The thought of a bare-chested mortal never even crossed his mind.

In his understanding, no matter how strong a mortal might be, it was absolutely impossible for him to crush the rocks across dozens of li of mountain terrain into such a state.

Fear lingered in his heart for only two short breaths.

Then an even more fervent emotion utterly drowned it.

Chen Yuanshan abruptly rose to his feet.

"With such terrifying crushing tracks, that treasure must be extraordinary indeed!"

An intensely greedy light erupted in his eyes, and even the aged skin on his face trembled with excitement.

For a secret treasure capable of crushing rock layers, taking a little risk was completely worthwhile.

Once he got his hands on it, forget the lord of Black Mud City—even the inner sect elders of the Azure Firmament Sword Sect would be worth challenging.

Chen Yuanshan flipped his left hand over.

He drew a palm-sized, dark-red circular compass from his storage sleeve.

The Bloodthirst Compass.

It was a magical artifact used specifically in the cultivation world to track those who had recently committed slaughter and carried intense fluctuations of living blood and vitality.

It was a hundred times more precise than a Spirit-Seeking Compass, which could only detect spiritual-energy fluctuations.

Chen Yuanshan bit the tip of his tongue and sprayed a mouthful of Foundation Establishment Realm life-blood onto the compass's surface.

The dark-red compass instantly erupted with a blinding scarlet glow.

The bronze needle at its center began spinning madly.

In the direction of the cave where the stele stood, that absolute, ancient oppressive weight tightly sealed away the aura released during A-Nan's transformation.

The Bloodthirst Compass could not penetrate the suppression of the thirty-thousand-pound City-Guarding Stele at all.

But the artifact immediately caught another fresh, exceptionally violent aura of blood and vitality within the forest.

The needle suddenly stopped.

It pointed unerringly toward the trail of pure yang blood and vitality carrying the life force of a second-rank great demon, scattered along the way when Lu Chen had just hunted the Rock-Cracking Bear near the outskirts of the forbidden zone.

The trail was exceptionally clear, winding upward through the shrubs and heading straight for the mountainside.

Chen Yuanshan looked in the direction indicated by the needle.

At the end of his sight, he could vaguely make out a cave on the mountainside, half-covered by jagged rocks.

He had no idea it was the gap left behind by the City-Guarding Stele blocking the entrance.

His mind completed an entire chain of deductions according to a cultivator's logic.

Chen Yuanshan threw back his head and let out a piercingly shrill, savage laugh.

"You old bastard, hiding in a cave and using mortal blood to refine an evil treasure—did you really think this old man could not trace your roots?"

Chen Yuanshan tucked the Bloodthirst Compass back into his sleeve.

His purple robe snapped loudly in the gale.

With a leap, he returned steadily to the top of his top-grade flying sword and looked down from above at the thirty heavy cavalrymen below.

"Entire army, form an anti-cavalry formation!"

Chen Yuanshan's voice carried the pressure of the Foundation Establishment Realm, exploding against every heavy cavalryman's eardrums.

"Cock the bows and crossbows! Attach talismans to your bodies!"

The thirty heavy cavalrymen immediately changed formation.

Heavy armor-piercing repeating crossbows were mounted upon the rhinoceroses' broad backs, their thick bolts gleaming coldly.

Every one of them pressed a life-saving golden-light talisman directly onto the heart-protecting mirror over his chest.

"Even if you have to fill the gap with your lives, you will seize that treasure for this old man!"

The heavy cavalry answered with a thunderous roar, and the collision of Black-Iron weapons shook heaven and earth.

The armored rhinoceroses once more set their thick limbs into motion.

This elite force, armed to the teeth, rumbled powerfully along the compacted trench toward the cave on the mountainside.

Dirt flew, and battle intent boiled.

They marched in neat formation, believing themselves to be embarking on a hunt with victory already in hand.

Yet no one noticed the anomaly above them.

At the end of the trench, atop an ancient towering tree so thick it would take several men joining arms to encircle it.

Deep within the high canopy's branches and leaves.

A pair of eyes watched everything from above.

Lu Chen crouched upon a thick branch.

His broad right hand gripped the bark tightly, while half a century-old Black-Iron Chain coiled around his left arm.

The pure yang blood and vitality of the eleventh layer of Iron Cloth Shirt had been forcibly suppressed beneath his skin and flesh, not allowing even a wisp of heat to escape.

He simply watched in silence as the cultivators and heavy cavalry below advanced in orderly formation.

There was not the slightest emotional ripple in his gaze.

Only the pure, icy cruelty of watching prey marked for slaughter step into his territory.

Beneath the covering of muscle, his joints slowly began to contract and exert force.