While Li Ping was setting bait outside Northern Mang Mountain to lure a fourth-tier baleful corpse...
At the spirit eye of Northern Mang Mountain's upper-grade fourth-tier spirit vein lay the former lair of the fourth-tier middle-stage Bloodwheel Baleful Corpse.
But two full sixty-year cycles earlier, when the Taimao Secret Realm opened, the baleful corpse Ye Xu had already traveled to the Nine Provinces Continent through the great intercontinental teleportation formation in the Immortal City.
Before leaving, he had returned a peach for a plum, handing over all the ghost formations he had laid within Northern Mang Mountain to Yu Shuangchi.
So, strictly speaking, Northern Mang Mountain was now the Yu Household's territory.
At that moment, in the heart of Northern Mang Mountain...
A grand hall towered amid layer upon layer of ghost formations. Across the level ground for hundreds of miles around it ran countless channels, each dozens of feet wide, filled with surging blood.
The blood was clear and translucent, like flowing rubies.
A strange, sweet fragrance filled the air, invigorating anyone who caught a whiff.
Viewed from high above, those countless blood-filled channels could easily be seen forming an exceedingly intricate, uncanny pattern.
The grand hall stood at the very center of that pattern.
Even more horrifying were the thousand stone pillars surrounding the hall, each dozens of feet in diameter and thousands of feet tall, with a third-tier aberrant creature atop it.
The aberrant creatures wailed in terror, but fine meshes of blood bound them firmly to the pillars, leaving them no way to escape.
At the center of those thousand pillars, nearest the edges of the hall, six translucent blood-jade pillars tens of thousands of feet tall and hundreds of feet across formed a vast hexagram around the hall.
An aberrant creature was likewise imprisoned atop