Unloading the Stele to Camp and Protect the Blind Girl, Knocking on the Black Gate with One Arm

Lu Chen grabbed the top-grade storage ring that had belonged to Chen Yuanshan.

His pure yang blood and qi roiled. His huge hand was like a red-hot branding iron as it clenched the exquisite artifact tightly.

The ring bore the protective divine sense left behind by a Foundation Establishment Realm cultivator.

The two collided with a resounding crash.

The rough flesh in Lu Chen's palm, which had only just scabbed over and healed, was instantly sliced open by the invisible backlash of divine sense, bursting into countless fine bloody cuts.

He did not even furrow his brow, much less retreat half a step.

With brutal force, Lu Chen drew upon the raging blood and qi of the twelfth layer of Iron Cloth Shirt within his body and forcibly crushed down on it.

A fierce stabbing pain erupted from the depths of his soul. An ordinary person would have long since been screaming and rolling across the ground.

Yet Lu Chen endured the agony and used his scalding pure yang blood and qi to "burn out" that lingering strand of Foundation Establishment divine sense on the spot.

An incomparably shrill, intangible wail rang out in the air.

The divine sense vanished into smoke.

Once the divine sense dispersed, how could Lu Chen possibly know the immortal cultivators' refined methods of gently probing with true qi and retrieving items?

His ten thick fingers suddenly exerted force.

His utterly tyrannical finger strength acted directly upon the fragile pocket-space formation on the storage ring.

Crack!

The formation immediately collapsed and burst apart.

The pills and spirit herbs stored inside the ring exploded out, raining down with a clatter over the surrounding muddy ground.

Lu Chen crouched and roughly rummaged through the mess.

He quickly dug out several enormous snow ginseng roots, top-grade century-old specimens far beyond the outer sect grade.

These supreme spirit medicines contained frightfully potent cold poison. The slightest touch would freeze an ordinary mortal into an ice sculpture on the spot.

Lu Chen paid it no mind. He grabbed the snow ginseng and stuffed it straight into his mouth, swallowing it whole.

The dreadful cold poison immediately lashed back within him, making even the gaps between his bones throb with agony.

But the Ultimate Dao Furnace within his body spun madly, brutally grinding apart and stripping away the snow ginseng's violent medicinal properties, forcefully taming them into the gentlest, purest source of life.

Only after repeatedly confirming that not the slightest trace of violent residue remained within his body

did Lu Chen condense it into a single crystalline drop of heart's blood.

He bit open his tongue, lowered his head toward A-Nan, and carefully fed that drop of heart's blood into the little blind girl's mouth.

Nourished by the medicine's power, A-Nan's burning fever receded, and she fell into a deeply peaceful sleep.

Then Lu Chen picked up the scattered "Qi-Gathering Pills" and "Spring-Returning Pills," shoveling them into his mouth by the handful along with their white jade porcelain bottles.

After chewing and swallowing them, his mortal flesh was so tyrannical that it directly expelled all the so-called "spiritual qi of heaven and earth" contained in the pills as though venting waste gas.

He extracted only the pills' most fundamental "vegetation essence and vitality."

Boundless life force coursed through his body, forcibly stitching together the ruptured tendons throughout his limbs and bones, granting him the brutal strength needed for a long journey.

Strength filled him once more.

Lu Chen turned around, hoisted the thirty-thousand-jin City-Guarding Stele back onto his shoulder, and trekked several li through the depths of Immortal-Breaking Mountain in the dead of night.

With every step, the ground shook violently.

Lu Chen knew very well that if he carried this huge stone over there, the earthquake-like tremors beneath his feet would surely scare off all the rats in the black market.

He stopped before a hidden miasma-filled valley, still several li away from the underground black market—a lawless place specially gathered with rogue cultivators and desperate outlaws.

Lu Chen's shoulders suddenly sank.

He slammed down the thirty-thousand-jin Dao Stele. It smashed heavily into the muddy earth beneath his feet, more than half of it sinking underground, becoming a secure camp that could attack when advancing and defend when retreating.

A-Nan was his one and only reverse scale.

There was no way Lu Chen could leave her here alone.

From the spoils, he found a snow-white Daoist robe from the Azure Firmament Sword Sect, the only garment that could be considered clean.

Lu Chen first laid the robe over his bare torso, using it as a barrier against the blood and grime covering him.

Then he used strips of cloth to bind the sleeping A-Nan firmly against his chest.

Ultimate Dao blood and qi passed through that snow-white Daoist robe, becoming an exceptionally gentle warm current that ceaselessly nourished A-Nan.

Only when he could truly feel A-Nan in his arms did Lu Chen dare release his killing intent without restraint.

To conceal his tracks, Lu Chen dug out a large black divine-sense-shielding cloak and draped it over himself.

The voluminous cloak completely concealed his iron-gray knotted muscles and those hideous, terrifying blood scabs.

Beneath the broad cloak, only a section of his thick right arm wrapped in Black-Iron Chain was exposed.

The cultivators' blood that had once covered the chains had long been forcibly evaporated by the lingering heat of the Ultimate Dao on Lu Chen's skin, turning into a layer of dark-red rust.

That rust was seared tightly into the refined iron's surface, releasing not the slightest bloody stench that might disturb A-Nan.

Those lofty immortal cultivators needed hand seals, incantations, and endless effort to borrow the spiritual qi of heaven and earth when they killed.

But Lu Chen only needed to clench this fist!

The scene shifted.

Inner Black Mud City, the City Lord's Manor.

Inside the spacious main hall, the city lord was sprawled on the floor without a shred of dignity, his entire face pale and bloodless.

In the center of the hall, several heavily armored cavalrymen who had luckily escaped knelt on the ground, weeping and shouting as they reported the battle.

"Elder Chen is dead! A monster wreathed in blood-red wolf-smoke beat him alive until his body exploded!"

The city lord clutched his hair in both hands, muttering frantically.

"No spell fluctuations... yet it tore apart a sword formation with its bare flesh alone..."

"Such a savage monster—apart from those fur-clad, raw-flesh-eating barbarian creatures of the Western Wasteland from legend, only the Blood Demon Sect's Blood River Tyrant Body, lost for a thousand years, could accomplish this!"

"A Core Formation Devil Master! An old devil in the Core Formation Realm must be lurking in Immortal-Breaking Mountain!"

The city lord completed an entire chain of self-persuasion in his mind, thoroughly pinning this black pot on the demonic path.

Scared out of his wits, he rolled about on the ground and shrieked his orders, "Seal the city! Activate the grand formation and hold it to the death!"

Yet this city lord, whose courage had already shattered, had no idea

that at the exact instant Chen Yuanshan's soul had scattered and Dao vanished,

tens of thousands of li away, within the Soul Lamp Pavilion of the Azure Firmament Sword Sect's lofty inner sect,

the purple soul jade representing a Foundation Establishment Realm retainer suddenly exploded without warning.

The sound of its shattering completely alarmed the inner sect elder who was in secluded cultivation.

The scene returned once more.

The sour-smelling Mud Alley in Black Mud City's outer district.

The night was deep.

Old Man Zhang sat alone in his leaky, crumbling house, staring fixedly at the fragment of the Dao Stele atop the broken wooden table by the faint moonlight filtering through the window.

On the surface of this remnant that had fallen from the City-Guarding Stele, an extremely faint blood-red gleam flowed.

Old Man Zhang reached out with his withered hands, picked up the cold stone, and pressed it tightly to his chest.

Cloudy old tears streamed uncontrollably down his deeply furrowed cheeks.

Yet the back of this lowly old farmer, who had been a coward all his life, straightened for the first time ever that night.

His little grandson on the broken bed was not asleep.

The boy timidly asked, "Grandpa, don't immortals die?"

Old Man Zhang turned his head and stroked his grandson's hair with a rough hand.

He solemnly placed the Dao Stele fragment in the boy's palm, his voice more sonorous and forceful than ever before. "So long as your bones do not bend, immortals' necks are brittle too."

Deep within Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

A huge blood moon had just poked its head out from behind the heavy clouds.

Cold, yet faintly bewitching, moonlight poured down.

It shone upon the tightly clenched fists of the old man and child in Mud Alley.

It also shone upon the towering black stele within that shadowy miasma valley deep in Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

Having unloaded the thirty-thousand-jin burden, Lu Chen felt as light as though he had no weight at all.

Draped in that broad black cloak, he pressed the left arm protecting A-Nan tightly against his chest.

Like a peerless ferocious beast that had completely reined in its violent aura, he silently stepped into the black mist of the deep mountains.

Tonight, he would use this one arm and a mortal's iron fist to hammer open that black gate which devoured people without even spitting out their bones!

At the instant Lu Chen's foot stepped into the black market's fog,

several li away, the thirty-thousand-jin Dao Stele, more than half buried underground, seemed to sense its master's pure campaign of violence across the void.

A profoundly low hum issued from the heavy stele.

Even the earth around the black market's outskirts trembled almost imperceptibly with it.

At the same time.

Before the underground black market's gate, built entirely from piles of ghastly white bones,

two Qi Refinement Realm evil cultivator guards dozing against the bone wall suddenly felt every hair on their bodies stand on end, numbness spreading from their scalps to their heels.

They stared in utter horror at the dark forest ahead.

There was clearly not even the slightest fluctuation of true essence there.

Yet a thick, savage, blood-soaked Sha Qi like that of an ancient ferocious beast was crushing through the darkness step by step over the dead leaves, bearing straight down on them!