Inside the dimly lit tent, Chen Yong Black Dragon Envoy was taking a nap with his eyes closed, suddenly felt a pang of fear and abruptly opened his eyes.
Chen Yong listened intently, and heard snoring coming from both sides; his men were fast asleep in their tents.
In addition, two night watchmen were talking about something not far away.
The two must have drunk quite a bit, because one of them was slurring his words.
As Seventh Rank cultivator, Chen Yong possessed extremely keen senses.
Through these days of continuous blood sacrifices, he has also established a subtle connection with the remnant soul of that dragon.
With the Black Dragon Altar now completed, we have a basic grasp of this small secret realm.
If there were anything unusual, it shouldn't escape his senses.
Chen Yong was still not entirely at ease. Cloud Dragon Lower Court had been paying close attention to the Lake Heart Island and would likely send someone over again to check on the situation.
With another blood sacrifice, he should be able to refine the remnant soul of the dragon and upgrade the Black Dragon Gu to the Sixth Rank, or even the Fifth Rank!
The closer we get to success, the more careful and cautious we must be, and we cannot afford to be careless or relaxed in any way.
Even though Chen Yong didn't notice anything unusual, he still got off the wooden bed, picked up the long knife that was standing to the side, and went out of the tent.
The two men guarding the altar quickly stood up when they saw Chen Yong approaching.
"Master of the Altar," the two bowed deeply in greeting.
The Five Dragons Gang worships the Five Dragon Gods. Although it is called a gang, it is internally divided into many levels according to religious rules.
The crew members were all boatmen, so the person who steered the boat was called the helmsman, who was in charge of all the boatmen.
The leader of a helmsman can command anywhere from ten to several dozen people.
The person who leads the group in offering incense to the Dragon God is called the Incense Master. The Incense Master usually oversees a dozen or so branch masters.
Above the Incense Master is the Altar Master, who can perform rituals and is the head of the altar.
The vast Five Dragons Gang only has five leaders.
The Black Dragon Envoy is the master of the Black Dragon Altar. As the Black Dragon Envoy, Chen Yong's status is second only to the gang leader, and he wields enormous power within the gang.
Although the two gang members had followed Chen Yong for many years, they dared not be negligent in Chen Yong presence, even though they had drunk quite a bit of alcohol.
Chen Yong glanced at his two men; the smell of alcohol on them even overpowered the surrounding stench of blood.
However, he couldn't be too harsh on him.
In the dead of night, surrounded by a pile of heads and the terrifying remnant soul of a dragon, one might not be able to withstand it without a drink.
Chen Yong asked, "Is there anything unusual?"
Both subordinates hurriedly shook their heads vigorously, "Nothing unusual was found."
"I didn't hear anything."
As the two men spoke, their gazes turned together toward the entrance to the secret realm, which was sealed off by Yin Qi, resembling a giant black mirror.
Any living thing that enters will inevitably cause a surge of Yin Qi that glows.
A man said with a fawning smile, " The Yin Qi is as clear as a mirror; even if a mosquito flies in, we can see it. The altar master can rest assured."
Seeing that the two were still relatively lucid, and that there seemed to be nothing wrong, Chen Yong nodded. "Wake up, you can't afford the consequences if something goes wrong."
He glanced at the haphazardly piled-together heads as he spoke.
The two men understood Chen Yong's meaning. They had been flushed from drinking, but now their faces turned pale, and a layer of cold sweat appeared on their foreheads.
The altar master has already sacrificed hundreds of people in blood sacrifice, so what difference would two more heads make?
They had done many things with the altar master, but this was the first time they had ever performed a blood sacrifice involving so many people.
Through this incident, they also witnessed the altar master's ruthlessness and developed an even greater sense of awe towards him.
Chen Yong was still uneasy, so he circled the altar once.
He focused his attention on examining the soul-nourishing jar on the altar. This was a bone china jar made from the bone powder of a powerful Demon Beast, and the runes engraved inside were the most important soul-nourishing and Gu-refining method in their Five Dragon Gods Gu Technique.
The altar restrains the remnant soul of the dragon, the soul-nourishing jar tames the remnant soul, and blood sacrifice is the simplest and most direct way to nourish the remnant soul.
All Five Dragons Gu require blood sacrifice. However, this remnant dragon soul has been dormant for too long and is on the verge of destruction. A large amount of blood sacrifice is necessary to restore the dragon soul's power.
Fortunately, they used refugees from the Lake Heart Island. These people were of low status and had no Lineage power to protect them.
Even if hundreds of people go missing, no one will care.
After confirming that there were no problems, Chen Yong returned to his tent to rest.
In a corner unseen by Chen Yong, a strangely shaped green snake was slowly passing through the black mirror surface where Yin Qi was concentrated.
The Heavenly Puppet is not a living being. Although Zhou Wuji's Divine Sense is attached to it, it will not interfere with the Yin Mirror.
As it left, it left a ripple on the black mirror, but it did not emit any light.
The two men on night duty were talking quietly, neither of them noticing the subtle change in the black mirror.
Zhou Wuji retrieved the Heavenly Puppet and let out a long sigh of relief.
Even though his cultivation had broken through to the Sixth Rank, controlling the Heavenly Puppet from a distance still consumed a great deal of his Divine Sense and true essence.
I managed to hold on for a hundred breaths in one go; I almost couldn't hold on.
Zhou Wuji did not use the Rejuvenation Technique, but instead found a place to sit quietly and regulate his breathing.
It wasn't that he was reluctant to give up ten days of his life, but rather that the Rejuvenation Technique had its limits.
After being applied three times consecutively, the effect of the Rejuvenation Technique will rapidly diminish.
Based on what Heavenly Puppet observed earlier, the group inside should be from the Five Dragons Gang, including a Seventh-Rank Martial Artist who might also be a Gu Master.
A powerful, somber aura emanated from the altar.
Zhou Wuji was unaware of the cause and effect, but based on the altar, he deduced that the Five Dragons Gang was probably performing a blood sacrifice.
The Five Dragons Gang's Five Dragon Gods all require blood sacrifices. This has made the Five Dragons Gang infamous.
The Five Dragons Gang's blood sacrifice ritual is extremely secretive; even if outsiders hear rumors, they cannot find any evidence.
In addition, the gang leader Chen Dalu was very capable, and he brought together thousands of boatmen on the Yangtze River. No one in Yunyang Prefecture dared to touch him easily.
After Zhou Wuji killed Chen Dagou and the Azure Dragon Envoy, he became more concerned about the situation of the Five Dragons Gang.
Seeing the pile of heads, I guessed it must be a blood sacrifice ritual.
Looking at the clothes, appearance, and behavior of the people inside, he immediately guessed that they were members of the Five Dragons Gang.
The fact that only a few hundred people were sacrificed, including the elderly, women, and children, shocked and enraged Zhou Wuji.
In the eyes of these pirates, ordinary people's lives were as worthless as grass, and they could be slaughtered at will.
He then remembered what the Lao San and Lao Wu had once said: the Five Dragons Gang had taken away hundreds of residents from the Lake Heart Island.
Hundreds of people—that's a significant number anywhere.
Only the residents of the Lake Heart Island were forced to leave their hometown and wander around to make a living. Their numbers were so large that the disappearance of a portion of them would not attract the attention of the government.
Even for the government, fewer displaced people meant fewer problems, which was a good thing.
Zhou Wuji never considered himself a good person, nor did he have any grand ambitions to help the world. He just wanted to do his own thing, seek the Dao, cultivate himself, remain young forever, and ascend to become an immortal.
The Five Dragons Gang's madness aroused a strong killing intent in Zhou Wuji.
They're clearly a gang formed by people from the lower classes, yet they show no mercy to other people from the lower classes. These people are truly evil.
Although Zhou Wuji was furious, he was still able to calmly consider the battle plan.
It was clearly a separate space, what Daoists often referred to as a secret realm.
High-level secret realms can span tens of thousands of miles, and some are even worlds in themselves. In Daoism, such secret realms are called blessed lands and grotto heavens.
The secret realm before us should be quite small, and the environment inside is quite normal, no different from the outside.
The only unique thing about it is that the entrance to the secret realm is hidden and extremely difficult to find.
If he hadn't meticulously investigated step by step and discovered the numerous footprints forming a path, he wouldn't have been able to find this secret place.
The members of the Five Dragons Gang should all be hiding in the secret realm. The strongest among them is that Seventh-Rank Martial Artist, and the others should number around ten or twenty, but that's not much.
The real threat to him was the powerful remnant soul on the altar, or rather, some kind of evil spirit.
Both are transformations of remnant souls, but ghosts are transformed from humans, and thus have a relatively stable transformation path.
Evil spirits are unpredictable and mysterious due to differences in their original spiritual essence.
Generally speaking, evil spirits are also divided into Ninth Rank, with the lowest grades being Evil Qi, evil spirits, and evil shadows.
It's terrifying that evil spirits can manifest as shadows.
Evil spirits that can transform into a stable form can generally be classified as Rank Sixth Rank.
Zhou Wuji was unsure of the grade of the remnant soul on the altar, but the Five Dragons Gang's Gu Masters were only at the Seventh Rank. A remnant soul that a Seventh Rank could control and refine wouldn't be too outrageous, no matter how high it was.
Even before he received the ordination and initiation, let alone his greatly improved Law Technique, killing this group of people wouldn't have been difficult for him.
Zhou Wuji thought it over several times to make sure there was no plan or omission before taking out his sword and hanging it at his waist, holding the Tiger Wing Saber in his right hand.
The bamboo and iron secrets, along with some miscellaneous items, will be temporarily set aside.
With everything prepared, Zhou Wuji activated the Five Yin Pouch to shield himself and directly entered the Osmanthus Tree Secret Realm.
The Yin Qi, as dense as a mirror, rippled almost imperceptibly before returning to calm.
The main reason was that Zhou Wuji used the Five Yin Pouch to conceal his own vitality, condensing the Yin Qi restriction and the Yin Qi of the Five Yin Pouch intersecting, but it did not actually trigger the change of the restriction.
It was the dead of night, and although the two men on night duty were facing the entrance, they were quite a distance apart, so they couldn't see the subtle changes in the Yin Qi at the entrance, nor could they clearly see Zhou Wuji wearing the Five Yin Pouch.
Zhou Wuji ignored the two men on night duty, put away the Five Yin Pouch, and used his Six Yang Dharma Eye to lock onto the Seventh-Rank Martial Artist.
Among the crowd, this person's life force was intense and strong, making him very easy to identify.
Zhou Wuji calculated the distance; the two were less than fifty paces apart, which was considered very close to him.
He swiftly formed a hand seal with his left hand while silently chanting an incantation, and in an instant, a bright blue light sword materialized at his fingertips.
The azure light emitted by the Northern Dipper Seven Star Sword was still somewhat dazzling in the deep night.
The two men on night duty immediately spotted the lightsaber. From their perspective, it was just a line of blue light rising from the darkness, but they had no idea what it was.
The two men were somewhat surprised and unsure whether to warn the police or go forward to investigate.
Before the two could figure it out, Zhou Wuji activated his Divine Sense, sending the Northern Dipper Seven Star Sword hurtling forward through the air.
The Northern Dipper Seven Star Sword is formed from Law Power and is not a real sword, hence the sound of it cutting through the air is almost nonexistent.
Even so, Chen Yong still felt a sensation while resting in the tent.
The Black Dragon Gu he refined was originally a type of Gu worm specifically designed for combat.
Gu worms are something that one must be extremely sensitive to and wary of.
Chen Yong was unaware of the danger's origin, but he immediately woke up and grabbed the long knife beside the bed.
Then, he saw a streak of azure light shooting towards him.
Chen Yong had sharp eyesight and immediately recognized it as a foot-long, azure-blue light sword.
He was horrified. "It's a Daoist flying sword Law Technique! It's broken!"
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