Ghost Gate Pass on Yellow Springs Road

A short while later, in Li Boyang's home.

Watching Big Girl finish off the remaining gruel, then sit beside him with a satisfied expression.

Li Boyang's feelings grew even more complicated.

As a soul from a civilized society, he could not take such things for granted.

Driven by these tangled feelings, Li Boyang even pulled himself free of the joy of gaining supernatural power and realized for the first time that this was a real world.

Perhaps this world did indeed have gods, monsters, demons, and devils.

But this world also had ordinary people, the common masses.

As he pondered this, physical exhaustion made Li Boyang close his eyes again.

The effort required to send the Sword Pill out to kill an enemy was far greater than Li Boyang had imagined.

Then, without anyone noticing, wisps of faint Sha Qi rose from underground and silently flowed into Li Boyang's body.

Li Boyang rolled over in his sleep, and the red down atop his head began burning again.

"..."

Noticing this, Big Girl beside him curiously reached out to touch Li Boyang's hair again.

Feeling the warmth against her palm, Big Girl unknowingly drifted off to sleep as well.

The rather small room thus fell quiet once more.

Only when Li Boyang occasionally ground his teeth, revealing the four fangs quietly growing in his mouth, was there any proof that the Sha Qi was not entirely without effect.

At the same time, in the mountain god's temple on Flying Peak.

By the time Xiluo finally dragged all of Ruifu's remains into the rear temple, dense Qi of Earth Sha had already wreathed nearly half the mountain behind it.

All the nearby vegetation withered and yellowed, and the once-fertile soil turned into a mire.

Only species with tenacious vitality could continue growing in such a harsh environment.

Fortunately, a divine statue still offered protection here, keeping this Qi of Earth Sha from spreading.

Otherwise, the land for a hundred li around would probably have become a barren waste where livestock could not breed and humans were seldom seen.

"That's why these vicious gods formed from Sha Qi are so hateful..."

"Being ill-tempered in life was bad enough, but even dead, they won't give anyone a moment's peace."

Sprawled listlessly before the main hall, Xiluo could not help complaining to her elder sister's divine statue.

"But that baby really did surprise me. To think he could perfectly retain the Sword Pill's power after reincarnation."

"With the Sword Pill's protection, and his innate fate as one of the Auspicious Omens, the Sha Qi left after Ruifu's death shouldn't affect him too badly, should it?"

At this point, Xiluo visibly hesitated.

Leaving aside whether Li Boyang was one of the Auspicious Omens by birth or a demonic fetus descended from heaven.

The aggression and corrosiveness inherent in Qi of Earth Sha alone were more than an ordinary body of flesh and blood could withstand.

Not to mention that Ruifu's Qi of Earth Sha was a genuine curse.

In this age, practically any Divine Ability involving curses was impossible to counter.

"I fed him so much flesh and blood from mountain monsters a while ago. Withstanding the erosion of Sha Qi shouldn't be a problem."

"That curse is rather troublesome, though..."

"But at most, it'll only make him develop a few unusual manifestations. No great problem!"

"That baby was born with unusual manifestations anyway. What's the big deal about a few more?"

Muttering quietly to herself, Xiluo thought of his headful of red down.

If Xiluo had not been mistaken, those hairs that had yet to grow in fully seemed to have properties similar to a Fire-Fur Rat's pelt.

Warding off fire and cold, resisting blades and swords...

One could say that the little brat was already a "spirit creature" among humans.

"A pity he still falls short of my sister. I wonder what sort of Divine Ability that vertical eye between his brows will nurture."

After rambling complaints to the divine statue for a long while, the utterly exhausted Xiluo soon fell asleep as well.

Whoosh!

Without a sound, the statue of the Goddess of War in the main hall gave off a faint glow.

The robe with civil and martial sleeves draped over the statue floated up, settling neatly over Xiluo.

The wide-open doors of the mountain god's temple were also brushed by an invisible breeze at that moment and quietly closed.

Creak...

With a barely audible sound of closing doors, the entire hall sank once more into lingering dimness.

Having swiftly entered dreamland, Xiluo even began to snore.

It stood in stark contrast to the Sha Qi behind the mountain, which continued to seethe and worsen.

Yet what no one noticed was this.

With Ruifu's death and the disorder in the earth veins' Sha Qi...

A barren place shrouded in thick black smoke, not far from Flying Peak, was undergoing a strange transformation at the same time.

Whoosh!

Yin Qi more bone-piercing than a polar wind gathered, and an almost solid black silhouette emerged into the sunlight.

When the Yin Qi took solid form, a yin deity several zhang tall, with an ox's head and a human body, appeared out of thin air.

"Evil done in the living world will meet its due; the Netherworld demands souls, and I come to summon you."

A chilling yin wind formed a path to the Netherworld behind Ox-Head.

At the end of this path stood an enormous ceremonial gateway.

From afar, three large characters could plainly be seen inscribed upon it: "Ghost Gate Pass."

-Yellow Springs Road, Ghost Gate Pass; the Yin Court of the Underworld judged good and evil.

-Flowers of the Other Shore, River of Forgetfulness; the Divine Stone of Three Lives discerned cause and effect.

-Meng Po's Soup, Bridge of Helplessness; the Six Paths of Reincarnation determined the next life.

Clearly, this towering ox-headed yin deity came from this world's Netherworld.

"Wealth and rank in life all come to naught; in death, follow me into the ghostly throng."

Resting his enormous fork on his shoulder, Ox-Head murmured in a deep voice.

As though imbued with magic, his voice dispersed the thick black fog that perpetually shrouded this area.

Beneath that billowing smoke, a three-legged furnace a full ten zhang tall lay tilted on the ground, with nearly half its body sunk underground.

Even so, the flames in this three-legged furnace still burned.

The thick black fog that had shrouded this area was the lingering smoke produced by the burning furnace.

This thick black smoke not only obscured sight, but constantly emitted terrifying poison of its own, leaving scarcely a blade of grass wherever it passed.

Especially after the earth veins' Sha Qi fell into disorder, the flames inside the three-legged furnace instead burned all the more fiercely.

"This method of refining Sha again?"

"Who dares offend the majesty of the Nether Bureau and reenact the tragedy of the Tufang ghost gods?"

With that, Ox-Head abruptly brandished his sharp fork and stepped without hesitation into the area shrouded in black mist.

"Awooo!"

In an instant, ghostly wails and wolfish howls rang out from the mist.

After those ghostly wails and wolfish howls, an old man with a weathered face, his entire body exuding a deathly chill, appeared like a phantom and blocked Ox-Head's path.