She could only walk from the prosperous inner city all the way to the outer city.
As she walked, the scenery around her began to change, as though heaven and earth had been overturned.
The smooth jade-paved streets became muddy roads riddled with potholes. The spirit-powered flying cars hovering overhead vanished, and the luxurious shops packed tightly along both sides gave way to low, dilapidated shanties.
These were the outer city's slums.
The place where the Great Xia Immortal Dynasty's lowest-ranking cultivators and mortals gathered.
Spiritual energy was thin here, and the air reeked of sour, rotting household waste and foul sewage.
The cultivators along the roadside were all sallow and emaciated, their eyes filled with wariness and greed.
At the mouth of a muddy alley, Su Yueli stopped.
A bloody fight was unfolding inside.
Two low-level cultivators at the third level of Qi Refining were fighting to the death over a fragment of lower-grade spirit stone on the ground.
One of them drove a rusty iron blade deep into his opponent's abdomen.
Blood gushed out, staining the muddy water red. Without the slightest hesitation, the victor kicked the corpse aside, snatched up the spirit stone fragment covered in mud and blood, and ran into the labyrinth of shanties without looking back.
"First Realm cultivators..."
Su Yueli quietly watched the corpse on the ground.
Ten thousand years ago, some cultivators had formed battle arrays and marched to their deaths to resist the Devil Race's invasion, to ensure their people's survival.
Ten thousand years later, in the Great Xia Immortal Dynasty, which boasted of its golden age of peace, the lowest-ranking cultivators slaughtered one another over a single inferior spirit stone.
Such were living beings. No matter how many years passed, the fundamental logic of survival remained the same: the weak