The boundless wilderness was heaved up by Transcendent Immortal might, forming a small, hemispherical Lesser Grotto-Heaven two li across.
Everything within the grotto-heaven disintegrated, and towering evil baleful qi filled it.
Clad in yellow-and-black Daoist robes, Yellow Qilin True Person stood at the dome of the grotto-heaven, his piercing eyes surveying the surrounding world like a white-browed qilin.
Bombarded by a thousand spells, the ground below had become an abyss reaching deep underground. The corpse of a wandering Daoist lay at its very bottom, covered in blood, with fragments of a sanxian scattered beside him.
A white-haired Daoist nun in golden armor stood near the corpse, the Earthly Sha Mace resting on her shoulder like a great iron club for ambushing people. Her eyes held a measure of bitter anguish at having gotten "no loot":
"That old devil was so cunning! He actually used an incarnation to roam outside, and didn't even carry anything on him. Doesn't that mean we fought this whole battle for nothing...?"
Yang Huaxian had roamed unchecked through the world for over three hundred years, weathering both the Righteous Path's encirclement at Northern Zhou's founding and the Witch Cult Rebellion, and outliving many towering figures of cultivation, including the Living Buddha of the Northern Lands. The reason was his caution.
The Demon Path's Sixth Realm was "demon transformation." Body cultivators became demon generals even larger than Chaochitai, while ghost cultivators' divine souls grew powerful enough to leave their bodies and command the power of heaven and earth.
Yang Huaxian and the Corpse Ancestor were both ghost cultivators. As long as their divine souls survived, they could possess corpses and return to life indefinitely. The Corpse Ancestor had to fight in person, so his divine soul was usually inside his mortal shell. Yang Huaxian was different: he