Chapter Sixteen: The Realm of Transcending the Gods
Five years later, a youth in green clothes silently appeared on the top of Yīn Shān Mountain, and the silent aura emanating from his body startled all the flying birds and beasts on the mountain.
This young man was Yu Feng, who had gone back to his hometown to cultivate in seclusion two years ago. At this time, he wore a green robe and the flying sword under his feet emitted bursts of green light. This was the Ling Jian refined from the Jiuyin Iron by him before he came out of the mountain cave. Two and a half years ago, he finally reached the realm of Lianqi Huashen, after which he spent one or two months consolidating his true yuan, and then practiced some five-element magic that could be used in the realm of Huashen.
"This is not the kind of shallow escape method used by some pirates and ninjas on the coast, but a real Taoist technique. It's not just the five-element escape method, but also techniques like the five-element thunder method. If you can refine it to the extreme, you can move mountains and seas with a flip of your hand, but that's something only heavenly immortals can achieve. Now, Yu Feng can probably only manage to flip over a small hill with great effort. Although his five-element technique is just beginner-level, if he can refine it to the point where the five elements are united, its power will also be astonishing."
Apart from the spiritual sword, Yu Feng also refined nine array flags. Each flag can be used as a top-grade spiritual artifact on its own, and when combined, they can form the Nine Extinction Soul Array, with power surpassing even top-grade artifacts. If he could absorb enough souls to cultivate the flag spirits into legendary artifacts, it would be an unknown feat. However, with Yu Feng's current cultivation, it was simply impossible, not to mention finding tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of yin souls.
To gather the materials for this Nine Underworlds Soul Destroying Array, almost all of the materials in the entire Dark Mountain Cave were used up. Those thirty plus years to grow ten or so stalks of Nine Underworlds Ghost Bamboo were almost all used up. At the same time, the Yellow Spring Water generated within the Dark Mountain Cave was almost completely depleted, not even one tenth remained. The several corpses of the Mysterious Shade Bodies that took nine years to find were also all used up. Not to mention those iron and copper essences placed on the altar over the years. In the end, Yu Feng still felt it wasn't enough, so he dismantled the Soul Collecting Bottle that had already evolved into a top-grade spiritual artifact, refining the yin souls and ghostly spirits inside into the array. Because there were no medicinal pellets to replenish his true yuan, the consumption of his Three Absolutes True Fire was not ordinary either. He used up the Mysterious Shade True Water he generated over these ten plus years, only then did this Nine Underworlds Soul Destroying Array finally take shape.
Thinking of the twenty years of hard work Yu Feng had put in to obtain these materials, it was all worth it. If this array's power wasn't great enough, he would have died from exhaustion. However, this array's power was indeed great, but using his spiritual energy was a different story altogether. With Yu Feng's current mid-stage Divine Transformation cultivation, his initial spiritual energy could only last for about ten breaths. If he encountered a powerful enemy, if the enemy didn't die within those ten breaths, then he would be the one to die. One could imagine Yu Feng's frustration at this moment. He had finally refined the heavy treasure, even dismantling the top-grade spirit vessel Soul Collecting Bottle, but he himself couldn't use it. If he forced himself to activate the array for another ten breaths, he estimated that within five breaths, he would be sucked dry by the Nine Pole Soul-Extinction Flag.
I took stock of what I have left, the Nine You Ghost Bamboo is down to two stalks, the Yellow Spring Water is less than a tenth of what it used to be, the Xuan Yin Water has five drops left, and there's still quite a bit of Yellow Spring Ghost Mushroom, but I don't know how to refine medicine. As for other materials, they're all gone.
The Jiu You Gui Zhu roughly takes three years to produce one root, but that's not the problem. The bamboo forest is constantly expanding, and after decades, there are already tens of thousands of bamboo shoots here. Xuan Yin Zhen Shui produces one or two drops per month, mainly relying on Huang Quan Zhi Shui; without it, the production speed of the rest would be halved.
If they were to generate the original scale on their own, it's unknown whether it would take twenty or thirty years. It seems that one can only go back to the previous life of collecting corpses and those commonly used items for refining equipment. However, seeing how the Qing dynasty has become like this, he really doesn't want to go to those mines to "take" things again.
But there's a way to go somewhere else and steal, first refine the raw materials into iron essence and copper essence in the Qiankun ring, and then bring them over. It shouldn't be a problem to get tens of millions of catties at once. You guys have been killing people and setting fires on my Jiuzhou land, it's not excessive for me to take some things. He thought about it and felt that he should still have a good reason, so he decided that as soon as he collected enough corpses, he would go visit the invaders' hometowns.
Then he hid his appearance, wielded his sword and flew out of the nine rivers, starting his great undertaking of collecting corpses. Yu Feng had already begun to feel that he was a true devil among the demonic path, otherwise which righteous cultivator would be so enthusiastic about collecting dead bodies?
In the four years that Yu Feng collected materials everywhere, few things happened in the Qing Dynasty. The Donghak Peasant Revolution broke out in Korea, and Japan took advantage of the situation to send troops to Korea and occupy Seoul. Japanese troops suddenly attacked Chinese transport ships and garrisons near Asan, triggering the First Sino-Japanese War. Zuo Baogui died in the Battle of Pyongyang. Deng Shichang, Lin Yongsheng, and others died in the Battle of the Yellow Sea. Japanese troops invaded the Liaodong Peninsula, and the people of Northeast China bravely resisted the enemy and defended their homeland. The Beiyang Fleet was defeated in the Weihaiwei War. The Qing government asked Japan for peace and was forced to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Xu Xilin led the Taiwan Righteous Army and Liu Yongfu cooperated with him to fight against Japanese troops. Kang Youwei and others presented a memorial to the throne, opposing negotiations with Japan and requesting reforms. Germany occupied Jiaozhou Bay, and the national crisis was severe. Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup, imprisoned Emperor Guangxu, and killed Tan Sitong, Yang Rui, Liu Guangdi, Lin Xu, and others (known as the "Six Gentlemen of the Wuxu Year"). This event is known as the "Wuxu Coup". The Wuxu Reforms failed. In Pingyuan County, Shandong Province, the Yihetuan led by Zhu Hongdeng launched an armed uprising. The United States proposed its policy of invading China, known as the "Open Door Policy". Under the influence of the Yihetuan movement in the Beijing-Tianjin area, similar movements broke out in other parts of the country, and a wave of anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggles swept across the nation. The Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China. The Yihetuan fought against the Eight-Nation Alliance in Langfang, Lao Longtou Railway Station, and Zijinlin Concession, among other places, besieged the Beijing Legation Quarter and Xishiku Church, and cooperated with Qing troops to block the Eight-Nation Alliance in Beilun. Russia sent troops to invade Northeast China, perpetrating the Heilongjiang and Jiangdong massacres.
These are all the places Yu Feng has been to. As long as he hears that there may be a battle, Yu Feng will go there. In which Yu Feng has also taken action countless times. Although he did not take action on the battlefield, but after the war, when collecting the bodies of the foreign devils or abandoned corpses that no one collected, waiting for the foreigners' funeral team, as long as those foreign devils dared to move their hands, Yu Feng would immediately strike and leave none alive.
Sometimes he killed more people than the foreigners who died on the battlefield, and in the mouths of foreigners, he had become a devil who would not hesitate to kill. The survivors were all left behind by Yu Feng because they did not take action against him, or they took action too late but were stopped by his image of killing without blinking an eye, so Yu Feng let them go.
Among those people, Yu Feng was simply a demon king who specialized in eating human corpses. Many people on the scene saw that the corpses near Yu Feng all disappeared, without even leaving any bones behind. What's even stranger is that he almost exclusively ate foreigners, did they taste better?
No matter what, from then on whenever there was a surplus of wind, those foreigners would no longer collect the corpses of their companions, because who knew if he ate people alive or not, since some people saw him kill and eat someone, and that person also disappeared. It's better to keep away from such a dangerous character. For this reason, the foreign soldiers gave him the nickname "Corpse-eating Devil King".
The title of "Corpse King" was later spread far and wide, not only did foreigners know about it, but also many people in the Qing dynasty knew about it. However, local villagers all called him the Raksha Demon King, a kind of Raksha that specialized in eating human flesh. Nevertheless, everyone knew that this Raksha Demon King liked to eat foreigners, and would only eat the corpses of Qing people when no one was around to collect them. As a result, Qing soldiers were not afraid of him, and when they were collecting the bodies of their fallen comrades, they would watch with schadenfreude as the foreign corpse collection teams dared not approach, standing far away instead.
In fact, the reason for this nickname is not only because of Yu Feng's collection of corpses, but also because he always wears a full set of black clothes when he comes out, even covering his head. Moreover, everyone who sees him thinks it's some kind of demonic illusion, making people see him as a one-body ugly monster in all black, which is even more terrifying. After all, Yu Feng doesn't want people to know that he's been collecting corpses on the battlefield, and he still wants to use his righteous identity to slay demons and evil spirits in the future.
The last time was almost nine years, and this time it's only been four years, but the result has already reached two-thirds of the previous number. However, he killed more foreigners in these four years than before, about 15,000 or so. Yu Feng can now clearly feel the karma binding him, and when he meditates or refines his equipment, illusions often appear, which is a manifestation of excessive karma. But Yu Feng remains unmoved, still taking ruthless action. These years of slaughter have made his will unyieldingly strong, not worrying in the slightest about the heavenly tribulation to come. If you don't make way, I'll kill my way out!
Yu Feng found it strange that the Taoist cultivators of the Qing dynasty had all disappeared. In the Jade Classic, it was said that there were often Taoist cultivators flying in the sky, but now, after running around the nine provinces for decades, he hadn't seen a single one, not even a high-ranking cultivator at the Return to Void stage, let alone the Transformation of Spirit stage. The highest two cultivators he had met were only at the Initial Qi Gathering stage, and the dozen or so Taoist priests who could catch ghosts and draw talismans hadn't even reached the level of entering the body with their qi. Those people were just beginners in the Taoist path.
According to Yu Jian, over a thousand years ago, the spiritual energy of heaven and earth was more than a hundred times higher than it is now. Although I don't know what caused the drastic change in the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, where did all those superior beings from back then go? It's not possible that they all ascended to immortality, right? Those who reached the realm of transforming into gods and returning to emptiness could live for over a thousand years without any issues. But why didn't I see even one during the Qing dynasty? At first, when I was still in the stage of attracting energy, I thought it was because my own cultivation was too poor and I couldn't detect those superior beings.
Later, his divine thoughts reached the peak of the Hua Shen period, but after four years, not a single high-ranking person was found. That is to say, something big had happened in the Zhongyuan Xiu Daojie, causing all those high-ranking people to leave or die. The latter reason is unlikely, but the Taoist tradition of those high-ranking people still exists, and no matter what, there should be a few Hua Shen period figures walking around outside.
Although there is his cultivation method in the jade slips left by Song Lingzi, Yu Feng did not cultivate all of Song Lingzi's methods because he found that those methods were no longer suitable for the current Xian Tian period cultivators. He only modified some parts of the method and cultivated it according to that method. Now the spiritual energy is too little, many of those methods and techniques require a huge amount of spiritual energy to support them, and some arrays are also unable to be activated due to insufficient spiritual energy.
