"Wondered who you were, you little bastard. So you're a remnant of Spirit Hall! What do you think you are? Do you think this is still ten thousand years ago, when your Spirit Hall rode roughshod over everyone?" Wang Shaojie stood before Ye Guyi, his figure towering.
"You remnants of Spirit Hall should be on your knees in gratitude just to be alive."
Ye Guyi had been strung up stark naked before Wang Shaojie. Without a disguise Soul Tool to conceal her aura, the trace of divine aura emanating from her had been detected by him.
A smug expression immediately spread across Wang Shaojie's cold, sinister face.
The Interrogation Room smelled of nothing but blood and mildew.
Ye Guyi lay on the floor, feeling only the spasms in her stomach. Three days earlier, Wang Shaojie had approached her wheelchair and offered her a bouquet of roses and a skewer of candied hawthorn berries. She had refused.
"Have you thought it through?" Once she had fallen to the floor, Wang Shaojie ground his deerskin boot into her scattered golden hair.
"That wasn't love." Wang Shaojie suddenly seized her chin, forcing her to look at the mottled bloodstains on the wall. "It was to teach you who holds the power of life and death over you now."
As a member of the current Sun Moon imperial family, even if only from a collateral branch, the humiliation of having his confession rejected by a commoner girl like Ye Guyi had branded itself deep into his heart.
You cripple. You dare reject me? From that moment onward, this thought had filled Wang Shaojie's mind.
"Failing to rise and salute a member of the imperial family, showing contempt for the imperial family." That was the charge Wang Shaojie had laid against Ye Guyi!
As for whether Ye Guyi, confined to a wheelchair with her leg injury still unhealed, could stand up, that had never been a question worth discussing.
What did a commoner girl amount to before a member of the imperial family, even if she came from a wealthy household, when she also carried Spirit Hall's sinful blood?
So what if she had been falsely accused? Did lowborn scum with sinful blood deserve human rights?
After taking a few steps, Wang Shaojie waved at the two Five-Ring Soul Kings nearby. "Bind her to the Dragon-Peeling Pillar!"
One of the two Soul Kings brought over an iron frame, while the other grabbed Ye Guyi by her golden hair and dragged her onto it.
With her soul power sealed by soul-power-suppressing handcuffs, Ye Guyi's face was as white as paper. She silently prayed to the light element again and again, because her mother had once told her that the light element would protect every kindhearted person.
Each hole in the Dragon-Peeling Pillar contained a metal spike. These spikes were three inches long, and their positions had been chosen with exquisite care: every one targeted a nonvital area. Once someone operated the mechanism, the victim would be pinned to the Dragon-Peeling Pillar by its spikes, yet would not die anytime soon.
"Little girl, I think you'd be better off accepting the young master's kindness and becoming a serf on his estate," an executioner told Ye Guyi in a grave voice.
"Otherwise, what a pity it would be for your beautiful life to wither like a fragrant blossom here today."
Ye Guyi said flatly, "I don't have the right to choose whether I live, but I have the right to decide how I die."
Wang Shaojie sneered. "Decide? According to ancient legends, your clan of sinful blood was cursed by the Supreme God, and all of you become Giant Vipers after death. What can you decide?"
Ye Guyi laughed. "And if I go with you, what can you decide for me?"
"Of course I can. I know plenty of people from the Holy Spirit Cult who are skilled at controlling souls. If you become mine, when you're about to die, I'll ask them to devour your soul or draw it into the Ten Thousand Souls Banner to become a vengeful spirit. Naturally, you won't have to suffer that curse after death."
By this point, Wang Shaojie's face was twisted into a savage grin.
Wang Shaojie looked over Ye Guyi's voluptuous figure and grew excited. He told the executioner, "Begin! Such a full body should look beautiful with blood spraying everywhere! When those eighty-one spikes pierce her all over, twisting, prying, and slicing, her screams might sound like celestial music to my ears."
The Dragon-Peeling Pillar was an exceptionally vicious instrument of torture: its spikes did not thrust out swiftly, but bored outward slowly, inch by inch, prolonging the victim's torment as much as possible.
Unlike when Huo Yuhao had suffered this torture in his previous life, Ye Guyi was a woman, and the raised curves of her buttocks kept her torso away from the Dragon-Peeling Pillar, even preventing her back from lying fully against it.
Wang Shaojie was already imagining Ye Guyi screaming on the Dragon-Peeling Pillar, gradually turning to beg him for mercy.
You lowborn scum. I just love watching you suffer, Wang Shaojie thought.
Unfortunately, in the next instant, just as the spikes were about to emerge and touch Ye Guyi's body, a layer of pitch-black darkness covered the entire Dragon-Peeling Pillar. The spikes were ground out of existence the moment they emerged!
This was bloodline power with an incomparably pure dark attribute.
"Where did a stray dog like you crawl out from? You dare trespass into the Interrogation Room and run wild?" Seeing a middle-aged man appear before him, the executioner spoke arrogantly.
Accustomed to throwing his weight around before commoners, he had forgotten to consider why the man dared to appear here.
Next came a man in a wheelchair, escorted by a squad of guards, along with a masked man.
The executioner met a gruesome end: suddenly, it was as though an invisible hand had clamped around his throat and lifted him into the air. Suffocation, struggling, then more suffocation... just like that, he breathed his last.
For someone of an executioner's station, provoking Long Xiaoyao, one of the world's three great Peerless Douluos, meant death.
"My minister Spirit Ice, is this the card you told me could be cultivated?" After checking Ye Guyi's aura, Xu Tianran, seated in his wheelchair, was quite satisfied with her.
Xu Tianran knew very well what lay at the heart of the conflict between the empire and the Holy Spirit Cult within Sun Moon's power structure.
"Yes!" Hearing Xu Tianran's question, Huo Yuhao nodded.
"Your Highness the Crown Prince, adding flowers to brocade is no match for delivering charcoal in the snow!"
"Time will wash everything away."
This was Huo Yuhao's advice to Xu Tianran. Xu Tianran had taken it to heart, not because Huo Yuhao possessed an eloquent tongue that could make lotuses bloom, but because immediately after returning to Sun Moon, Huo Yuhao had given Xu Tianran several pieces of Life Crystal from the Lake of Life that Di Tian had gifted him.
Whether from the true nature he had seen as an [audience member] in "Peerless Tang Sect" or from his experiences in his previous life, Huo Yuhao could be certain that Xu Tianran harbored sky-high killing intent toward the Holy Spirit Cult and Evil Soul Masters.
It was simply that Xu Tianran concealed it extremely well at this point.
For Huo Yuhao, everything he did in Sun Moon would go smoothly, because in this life, there was little conflict between him and Xu Tianran.
Huo Yuhao looked at Ye Guyi. Only upon realizing that he had fortunately arrived before the spikes touched her did some of the anxiety weighing on his heart ease for the moment.
Of course, although Huo Yuhao wore a new soul-tool disguise mask, Ye Guyi, barely breathing as she hung bound to the Dragon-Peeling Pillar, still felt a sense of familiarity as she gazed at the man addressed as "Spirit Ice" before the emperor's seat.
"By the way, my minister Spirit Ice, why did you tell me not to get involved in anything happening in the Star Dou Great Forest over the next few months? You should know that the Soul Hunting Operation organized by Shrek Academy this time is on such a scale that it could be called a grand event throughout the Soul Master World!" Xu Tianran suddenly asked.
Before you continue