Shi Feiyang said to the Old Demon of Iron City Mountain, "Tell me whatever method you have first. If I judge it to be a genuinely good one, I'll spare your daughter."
The old demon laughed. "In over a thousand years, you're the first person who has dared bargain with me like this. Very well. I don't think you're the sort to go back on your word, fellow Daoist, so I'll tell you first!"
At their level of cultivation, they truly could not behave like street thugs and scoundrels. The old demon would speak first, and if Shi Feiyang found the method unsatisfactory, he could decline to use it. But once he used it, he had to spare the Red Flower Princess.
The old demon began explaining something that every direct successor of their lineage invariably did—build hells!
His own Iron City Mountain went without saying. It had been built in imitation of the "Great Iron Ring Mountain" described in the Buddhist Sutra of the Original Vows of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva.
The Iron City Mountain World consisted mostly of ocean, with a lone island at its center. On the island stood a mountain city cast from iron, while eight layers of hell lay in each direction throughout the surrounding ocean.
The Sand God Boy, Jiupan Po, and Posun Po, who lived in seclusion in the Northern Heavenly Mountain, lacked the ability to create separate worlds, but they had all established hells within their cave abodes.
Of these, Jiupan Po's were the most systematically arranged. She had ten great hells in total, the most famous being Black Hell, which contained seventy-two forms of torture. Even demon heads imprisoned there suffered agony beyond words.
But still more famous, and of an even higher order, was Stone God Palace.
Stone God Palace was a