Demon-Subduing Well

As a humble Rogue Cultivator who practiced Dao on Plum Blossom Mountain near the Heavenly Vault Plain,

Zhou Yu was quite familiar with the ruins of the Jade Firmament Divine Dynasty.

About a month ago, this "Demon-Subduing City" had suddenly blazed with the light of treasures. At the same time, the thunderclouds had rolled apart, throwing the city's gates wide open.

The sight had undoubtedly given people the impression that a "supreme treasure had appeared," and after repeated calculations, quite a few cultivators who had practiced "deduction techniques" had confirmed the news.

Thus, more and more Rogue Cultivators had been drawn over to linger nearby, including quite a few veteran powerhouses of unorthodox paths.

No one knew who had first been unable to restrain himself, rushing into the Demon-Subduing City and leaving with a Law Treasure.

After that, more and more cultivators had slipped inside and dug up treasures and Law Artifacts from the Jade Firmament Divine Dynasty.

Then no one could hold back any longer.

As an old neighbor of the Demon-Subduing City, Zhou Yu, a local cultivator, had naturally been unwilling to fall behind and had rushed in to seize treasures.

But once several hundred cultivators had been caught up in it, the thunderclouds had closed again, and the Demon-Subduing City had allowed people to enter but not leave.

Then everyone had realized they had been deceived.

"So the treasures were a lie?"

Hu Mang asked with interest.

Zhou Yu smiled bitterly and shook his head.

"You certainly can't call it a lie. At least, there really are quite a few treasures left over from the Divine Dynasty in this Demon-Subduing City, and even some spiritual objects of heaven and earth-"

Zhou Yu pulled out a palm-sized Spirit Stone.

The moment the Spirit Stone appeared, a layer of spiritual mist gathered around it.

"Like this."

"Mid-grade-no, a high-grade Spirit Stone!"

Hu Mang looked astonished.

High-grade Spirit Stones were, after all, items controlled by the Heavenly Gate.

Once discovered, they had to be surrendered.

Of course, the Heavenly Gate would compensate their owners with a corresponding number of Spirit Coins.

If the official exchange price for a low-grade Spirit Stone was a thousand,

and a mid-grade Spirit Stone exchanged for ten thousand,

then the starting bid for a high-grade Spirit Stone was a million!

And even at that price, they were almost impossible to find on the market.

This one stone alone could cover all of Hu Mang's surgery expenses!

It could even pay for another nine courses of treatment.

To his surprise, Zhou Yu smiled bitterly and shook his head.

"This isn't a Spirit Stone. It's a thunder crystal. In terms of Spiritual Qi alone, it's indeed no worse than a high-grade Spirit Stone, but it was formed from the concentrated essence of the thunder power of heaven and earth. The power of thunder inside it is extremely violent. Even a cultivator with a Lightning Spirit Root would have a hard time refining it in a short while."

"We've dug up quite a few things like this."

"It's yours, fellow Daoist."

Zhou Yu tossed the thunder crystal into Hu Mang's hand.

Hu Mang pondered for a moment, but in the end, he couldn't resist the temptation of "money power" and put it away.

"But this thing isn't much use for getting us out."

"The divine spear I found earlier is much the same," Zhou Yu said after a pause. "If I'm not mistaken, it should be a spear used by a heavenly soldier of the Divine Dynasty."

According to Zhou Yu, even in the history of the Azure Mysterious Realm, the Jade Firmament Divine Dynasty had been a superpower rarely seen throughout the ages. Composed of nine great thunder domains, thirty-six thunder prefectures, and three hundred and sixty thunder offices, it had been a behemoth that ruled nearly half the Central Continent.

A single thunder office might have governed more than a dozen Divine Dynasty cities like the Demon-Subduing City.

And even that wasn't the lowest level of its organization. The actual basic units were thunder shrines, the so-called "temples of the thunder gods."

As Hu Mang understood it, they were organizations akin to Demon Suppression Branch Bureaus.

But thunder gods alone weren't enough to maintain order at the local level in the Demon-Subduing City. In particular, given the city's function as a prison, there must also have been quite a few "heavenly soldiers of the Divine Dynasty" standing guard, responding to incidents, and patrolling.

And by pure chance, Zhou Yu had found a damaged heavenly soldier, who happened to be holding a "divine spear."

"Right here."

Zhou Yu pointed ahead. It wasn't a building, but a deep well, its surroundings densely covered with demon-subduing patterns, though most of them could no longer be activated.

"The Demon-Subduing Well?"

Looking at the black well, which seemed rather bottomless, Hu Mang gave a half-smile.

"You aren't trying to trick me into the well, then activate some restriction and blast me to death, are you, fellow Daoist?"

Zhou Yu shook his head with a smile and actually swung himself down into it. Hu Mang raised an eyebrow, pulled out his "spiritual power circuit diagram" again, and looked it over.

"If I calculated correctly, this should be a 'high-voltage electrical shaft,' so-"

Hu Mang turned his hand over and produced an object. After looking it over for a moment, he suddenly smiled and jumped straight down.

Unexpectedly, though he had thought the "well" was bottomless, he discovered after jumping in that it was only a little over one zhang deep.

Beyond it was a long passage.

Hu Mang followed the passage forward and soon saw Zhou Yu's back, with a light visible ahead of him.

The light came from around a bend, beyond which lay a small thunder pool.

Thunderlight flickered faintly through the pool, accompanied by the indistinct sound of running water, while constant crackling filled the air.

At the very center of the thunder pool stood an imposing heavenly soldier, his head held high. Clad in old, damaged silver armor, he stood straight as a pine, solemn and dignified, silently guarding the place.

Hu Mang's gaze fell on a spear as thick as a goose egg in the heavenly soldier's hand.

The spear was as thick as a goose egg, with a striking form and an austere air of antiquity.

Its shaft had the solid look of jade and glimmered with a cold, dark-cyan light. Fine thunder patterns covered it from end to end, as though naturally engraved upon it as Dao seals.

The spearhead's edge was fully bared, its keen light seemingly capable of tearing thunder apart. It possessed a demon-subduing majesty that suppressed Sha and slew evil.

"Were the heavenly soldiers of the Jade Firmament Divine Dynasty really heavenly soldiers from the upper realm?"

Hu Mang suddenly asked the question before stepping forward.

Zhou Yu shook his head. "How could an unorthodox Rogue Cultivator like me hear secrets like that? But according to the rumors, back then, the Daoist, demonic, and Buddhist factions joined forces to overthrow the Jade Firmament Dynasty. In the great war between the two sides, more than one immortal did indeed descend to the mortal world, and quite a few even left inheritances in this realm."

If there were immortals, then heavenly soldiers didn't seem so shocking either.

Besides, no one knew how many years this heavenly soldier had been dead. Though his pressure was still considerable, it wasn't enough to make it difficult for Hu Mang to take a single step.

Hu Mang glanced at Zhou Yu and jumped straight into the thunder pool.

Behind him, an indescribably complicated expression appeared on Zhou Yu's face.

At that moment, Hu Mang acted decisively. He took two or three steps forward and grabbed the spear shaft, which was as thick as a goose egg.

But the thunder pool, which had seemingly stopped operating, rumbled to life at that instant.

Not only did terrifying thunder power erupt from the spear shaft, but one thunder serpent after another also sprang from the dried-up thunder pool, lashing the surroundings and gouging great black furrows into them.

Its power forced Zhou Yu to retreat again and again, his expression growing even more complicated.

Though this "divine spear" was clearly a divine weapon of exceptional sharpness, neither he nor the companions who had been with him at the time had taken it.

The reason was simple: the spear was the operating core of this "small thunder pool."

Once it was taken away, the innate divine thunder in the pool would run wild.

After several unsuccessful attempts, Zhou Yu and the others had had no choice but to give up.

But to someone who didn't know, it was a dangerous trap.

After all, who would give up the fortuitous opportunity to obtain an "immortal weapon"?

If "fortuitous opportunities" could be abandoned so easily, his group would never have been tricked into coming here in the first place.

Only-

Looking at the figure enveloped in thunderlight, Zhou Yu himself didn't know what he was thinking.

An unexpected disturbance soon arose.

It came not from ahead, but from behind.

Zhou Yu's expression changed. He immediately summoned his flying sword and turned to watch the rear on guard.

A figure soon came around the bend.

It was someone who had lost an arm, and whose face looked somewhat familiar.

You Lin'er!!

Hu Mang was currently refining the spear.

Or, to put it another way, he was trying to keep the spear from refining him.

He had known for a long time that something was wrong with that kid Zhou Yu.

And when he had landed in this "high-voltage electrical well," he had become even more certain that Zhou Yu was plotting something.

But Hu Mang had something to rely on too: the "fragment" that had brought him across worlds.

In fact, he had already tested it back when he first discovered that the "fragment" could absorb "thunder power."

While Doctor Sun had been rushing to finish a manuscript and a paper, Hu Mang had quietly made his way up to the top floor of the artificial thunder tribulation tower. The result had been shocking.

Even the eighth-floor tower thunder used to temper a Golden Core could be absorbed all the same.

So before coming here, Hu Mang had suspected that his journey across worlds might have been caused by an accidental mistake that made him absorb too much "tower thunder."

But now he had no time to think it over.

His left hand, which held the fragment, turned into a demonic claw almost instantly.

Although the violent thunder power was being steadily absorbed by the "fragment," the "pure Spiritual Qi" it was converted into still poured madly into Hu Mang's body.

The thunder power coming from this "spear weapon" was even fiercer than "artificial tribulation thunder."

Hu Mang almost instinctively circulated the Heavenly Gate General Qi Refining Instruction, and the "Spiritual Qi" filled all the meridians in his lower Dantian almost instantly.

His cultivation surged from one breakthrough to the next with unstoppable force-

Qi Training Eighth Layer

Qi Training Ninth Layer

Qi Refining Great Perfection

"Tiered Tower" Qi meridian opened!

"Heavenly Frog" Qi meridian opened!

The sensation was almost the same as the Turbid Qi eruption he had felt on Mount Merapi.

The difference was that before, Turbid Qi had blocked his meridians. Now, an indescribably pure Spiritual Qi poured into them, like sweet rain bursting through a floodgate, surging without end through the full circulation of his meridians.

An idea occurred to Hu Mang. He used the Dragon-Subduing Pile Method again, driving the Spiritual Qi into the acupoints that had been contaminated before.

A miracle happened!

As "Spiritual Qi" poured into the contaminated acupoints, the turbidity and filth that had been almost impossible to dispel were completely dissolved.

In just a few breaths, more than twenty acupoints had been cleansed and refined.

What the Heavenly Gate's technology back then could only have resolved by replacing his meridians with artificial ones had been a quarter purified in an instant by Spiritual Qi of this purity!

An unprecedented brilliance burst from Hu Mang's eyes!!