Slaughter

An hour later, in a secluded cave, Xiao Yu sat cross-legged and emptied the contents of three storage bags onto the ground!

With a clatter, a pile of items appeared on the cave floor.

Xiao Yu sorted through them, dividing them into several piles: Spirit Stones, magic artifacts, wooden and jade boxes, books and jade slips, and so on.

He first examined the Spirit Stones. Besides five mid-grade Spirit Stones, there were several hundred low-grade ones. "Heh, another tidy haul."

Next, he picked up the magic artifacts one by one to inspect them.

First was the small axe used by the triangular-eyed cultivator. On closer examination, it had a wooden handle a foot long attached to a palm-sized blade. A faint, cold gleam flickered along its edge, making it look exceptionally sharp.

Carefully sensing the spiritual pressure it emitted, he confirmed that it was a top-grade magic artifact. Since it had fought his mother-and-child swords for so long without falling behind, it was clearly a fine specimen even among top-grade artifacts.

Next was the blue-robed young man's shield. Cool to the touch, it was probably forged from meteoric iron. It was also a top-grade magic artifact, though it fell a little short of being a fine specimen.

Then came the beautiful woman's silk handkerchief. This was merely an ordinary top-grade magic artifact, worth at most three hundred or so Spirit Stones. Since it was something women used, he could trade it for Spirit Stones.

Xiao Yu picked up an almost transparent, slender needle. He had heard the triangular-eyed man call it the Shadowless Needle. This was an ideal magic artifact for sneak attacks!

In the cultivation world, needle-shaped magic artifacts were also called sinister artifacts, precisely because they were used for sneak attacks and underhanded ambushes, with excellent results. The needles were so thin that they were almost impossible to notice during an attack.

After carefully examining it for a while, Xiao Yu put the high-grade magic artifact, the Shadowless Needle, into his storage bag.

Xiao Yu also opened the wooden and jade boxes. They contained four medicinal herbs in total. Although none were ingredients for Foundation Establishment Pills, they were still quite good, and he put them away one by one.

His eyes then lit up as he began examining the jade slips.

"Maps, basic cultivation methods, the Insect Control Art... hmm? The Insect Control Art!" Xiao Yu picked up a jade slip taken from the Spirit Beast Mountain cultivator. It actually contained methods for raising and commanding spirit insects. Greatly interested, Xiao Yu began studying it intently!

It explained that spirit insects differed from human cultivators in their lifespans. Some lived only a few years or a few decades, while others could live for thousands of years. Spirit insects with long lifespans and powerful abilities took correspondingly longer to advance, and advancing was also more difficult for them. Certain rare and unusual species might need decades or even a century to advance from the first rank to the second.

By comparison, if human cultivators could not break through to higher realms, they could live for only a few hundred years at most. That was a tenfold difference from the lifespans of spirit insects.

However, if human cultivators encountered fortunate opportunities, they could advance relatively quickly. If things followed their normal course, by the time a human cultivator had formed a Golden Core or condensed a Nascent Soul, their spirit insects might still possess only first- or second-rank strength. That would make them as unrewarding as chicken ribs-hardly useful for anything at all.

Therefore, if cultivators wanted their spirit insects to advance sooner, they had to feed them pills or let them devour other demon beasts and spirit insects of at least their own rank to increase their cultivation.

The pills taken by human cultivators were formulated for human constitutions and did little for spirit beasts or spirit insects. Thus, spirit beasts had to be fed specially made Spirit-Nourishing Pills.

Spirit insects generally had foods they preferred to devour. Some liked Spirit Stones, while others liked spiritual herbs or pills. All these could accelerate their growth!

This jade slip recorded a method for refining pills that increased spirit insects' cultivation. These pills worked on spirit insects whose cultivation was equivalent to the Qi Refining Stage and were a simplified version of Spirit-Nourishing Pills.

It also contained some basic methods for commanding spirit insects, such as making them recognize a master and arranging them into specific formations for attack and defense.

Xiao Yu found all this information fascinating.

He placed the jade slip in his storage bag, sorted the other useful items into their proper categories, and put them away as well. Then he sat cross-legged to meditate. Night was approaching, and the danger would increase considerably after dark, so he had no intention of going out at night.

While Xiao Yu rested in the cave, the entire Forbidden Grounds entered the trial's first peak of slaughter.

All manner of formidable figures bared their fangs and began a sweeping purge of the weaker people nearby. The closer an area was to the center, the more frequent and bloody the killings became.

Of course, when evenly matched "experts" occasionally encountered one another, they would tacitly pretend not to see each other and pass by. It was not yet time for them to fight to the death.

Broadly speaking, the disciples of the various sects in the Forbidden Grounds could be divided into three categories!

The first consisted of extremely weak individuals whose cultivation had reached only the eleventh layer, or even the tenth. These were cannon fodder forced to enter for various reasons. Unless they were exceptionally lucky, they could scarcely escape the fate of being slaughtered.

The second consisted of those whose magical power was not weak, but who considered their overall strength far inferior to that of the other experts and knew they had no hope of obtaining the spiritual treasures.

These people focused on robbing others during the first two days, killing them and seizing their treasures. Then they would hide during the final two days, or see whether they could pick up anything others had overlooked. The triangular-eyed Spirit Beast Mountain cultivator and the blue-robed young man from the Heavenly Gate Fort whom Xiao Yu had killed belonged to this category.

The third consisted of the finest disciples each sect had sent into the Forbidden Grounds, the ones in whom their sect leaders had truly placed high hopes. These elites possessed profound magical power and were equipped with astonishingly powerful top-grade magic artifacts! Their goal was to kill members of the other sects and seize enough medicinal herbs.

This first large-scale slaughter was carried out simultaneously through a tacit understanding among these elite disciples. Their purpose was to eliminate those hoping to fish in troubled waters, lest such people hamper them at a crucial moment and cause fresh complications to sprout.

In a forest near the central region, a Spirit Beast Mountain disciple, his head drenched in sweat, desperately controlled a shield artifact to fend off attacks from several ice-crystal longswords.

Not far from him, a green python several dozen feet long had already been severed into several pieces. Blue ice crystals covered its wounds, and not a single drop of blood had spilled.

The shield was growing increasingly sluggish and was about to fail.

"Senior Sister, please spare me! I'm willing to give you everything I own, and you can plant a soul mark in me and make me your servant!"

At this moment of life and death, he hurriedly offered everything he could, trying to salvage his life.

"What use would I have for trash like you?" The speaker was a woman in white whose beauty rivaled a heavenly immortal's, but her eyes were filled with murderous intent.

Hearing this, the Spirit Beast Mountain disciple shouted, mustered his magical power, and thrust his shield forward, forcing the ice-crystal longswords back five feet. He then turned and fled without hesitation.

"Hmph, do you think you can escape?" The woman released a surge of magical power and activated the ice-crystal longswords' ability, freezing the Spirit Beast Mountain disciple's shield in place. The flying swords then swept around it and shot after the fleeing disciple.

The flying swords were astonishingly fast. All the naked eye could see was a fleeting streak of blue light as they caught up with the disciple, who had run only thirty feet.

An ice-crystal longsword slashed through him, instantly cutting the Spirit Beast Mountain disciple's body in two. Just like the python, not a trace of blood flowed from his wounds.

The woman in white was one of the elite disciples the Covering Moon Sect had sent into the Forbidden Grounds.

Beside a stream, a middle-aged man in yellow held a white curved-saber artifact against the neck of a rather attractive female disciple of the Blade Transforming Dock and barked:

"Take off all your clothes. If you serve me well enough to make me happy, I might just spare your life."

"S-sir, you must keep your word. Not just here-even after we leave the Forbidden Grounds, I can keep serving you..." the female disciple of the Blade Transforming Dock said, trembling. Then she began removing all her clothes.

As long as there was hope of surviving, she wanted to try anything. It's only sleeping with him once. I'll just think of it as being bitten by a dog, she told herself.

Soon, a graceful naked body appeared before the middle-aged man in yellow, shapely and snow-white all over.

Greed spread across the middle-aged man's face as his eyes roamed brazenly over her naked body.

The woman trembled slightly, watching him with dread.

Before long, sounds like weeping and pleading drifted from beside the stream...

A long while later, those suggestive sounds suddenly became a scream.

After dressing, the middle-aged man leisurely left the forest.

Beside the stream, the woman's head and naked body lay apart, her blood spreading across the ground.

On a barren mountain, a man in green robes with his face painted in garish colors frantically drove a great swarm of beetles to besiege several people dressed in Daoist robes.

In a sparsely wooded grove, a disciple of the Heavenly Gate Fort lay dead on the ground. Nearby stood a Daoist in gray, examining the Heavenly Gate Fort disciple's storage bag while cursing, "What a pauper! A complete waste of my time!"

And so, throughout the Forbidden Grounds, the strong slaughtered the weak everywhere, and faint traces of blood hung even in the air along its outskirts.