After Wang Ding finished arranging the one million cultivators Yu Mi had asked for, he personally rushed to the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range to meet her.
By now, it was almost certain that the Lord had already taken Ba and left this realm.
The Lord’s final action had earned universal praise from the cultivation world. In secret, however, countless eyes had shifted onto Wang Ding, Yu Mi, the Right Envoy Madman, and the Finance Envoy Sun Dilong. Cleaver Gang had risen to become the number one power in the cultivation world in less than two years, and everyone knew that this was inseparable from the Cleaver Lord’s decisive methods.
Now that the Cleaver Lord was gone, what could Cleaver Gang rely on to keep its seat at the top?
Every major power was wrestling with the same question.
Did Bao Gu appoint Yu Mi as successor out of recognition for her ability and concern for Cleaver Gang’s future? Or had she simply handed Cleaver Gang to Yu Mi as an inheritance? Could Yu Mi really shoulder Cleaver Gang’s grand enterprise? Without Bao Gu, would Cleaver Gang fall apart and fracture?
Wang Ding did not deny that Yu Mi was an exceptional talent, but in his eyes she was more of a battlefield commander than a grand strategist. She lacked the kind of mind that could scheme from thousands of miles away and decide victory before the armies met.
Her reckless expedition into the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range and its disastrous chain of consequences had already proved that she acted on impulse, with insufficient planning and weak control of the overall situation.
His personal trip into the mountain range to see her was, in no small part, to find out what plans Yu Mi had for Cleaver Gang’s future.
When Yu Mi saw Wang Ding, she immediately asked him about Bao Gu—how she had been captured by Ba, and everything that had happened after she left seclusion.
Wang Ding told her everything in detail.
Then he handed her two matters.
First was Bao Gu’s arrangement before she left—that Yu Mi would inherit the position of Cleaver Lord—and the plans for Cleaver Gang’s future.
Second was a question: what was Yu Mi’s purpose in digging up the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range?
Yu Mi held her wine gourd, taking a sip now and then.
As she listened to Wang Ding recount Bao Gu’s arrangements before her departure, endless sorrow rose in her chest, thick and suffocating. Bao Gu had left so decisively, so completely, without any path of return.
When Yu Mi stayed silent for a long time, Wang Ding simply took out his own wine from his storage ring and kept her company.
Yu Mi was grieving over losing Bao Gu. But he—had he not also lost his Lord?
Only after Yu Mi drained an entire gourd did she finally speak.
“I’ll temporarily act as Lord in my capacity as Arrow Envoy. As for me formally succeeding as Lord, don’t bring it up again.”
She looked at Wang Ding.
“Everything in Cleaver Gang stays as it is.”
Wang Ding asked, “Arrow Envoy… are you keeping the Lord’s seat vacant for her return?”
Could someone exiled into the void ever come back? He knew the answer in his heart, but could not bring himself to say it aloud.
Yu Mi asked, “How many days has it been… since Bao Gu took Ba away?”
“Seven days,” Wang Ding replied.
Yu Mi said quietly, “Bao Gu is still alive.”
Then she added another line.
“She needs time.”
Wang Ding murmured, almost to himself, “The Lord… what a pity.”
So young, so brilliant, with limitless prospects ahead of her, and yet—
He stood, turned toward Yu Mi, and gave her a deep, formal bow.
“The Lord rebuilt my life and recognized my worth. Without her, there would be no Wang Ding today. What she entrusted to me, I dare not fail. I will pour all my effort into assisting the Arrow Envoy.”
He hesitated, then said, “There is something I know I should not say, but I still hope the Arrow Envoy will hear me out.”
“Arrow Envoy, you are famed for your courage in battle, for your fearlessness in the face of death. But you are no longer a solitary rogue cultivator, nor a marginal nobody drifting along the edges of power. Your status is weighty. Your life, your actions, now have immense implications. They can directly affect the rise or fall, even the survival, of an entire power.”
“I beg the Arrow Envoy: do not lightly risk yourself again.”
“Xuantian Sect and Cleaver Gang now both lack the Lord sitting in command. You cannot suffer even the slightest mishap. If Cleaver Gang falls into chaos, Xuantian Sect will not be able to stand.”
He dropped to one knee and kowtowed.
“My words are presumptuous. I beg the Arrow Envoy’s forgiveness.”
Yu Mi helped him up and let out a heavy sigh, but said nothing.
She bore the titles of Young Sect Master of Xuantian Sect and Arrow Envoy of Cleaver Gang. All of these had been given to her by Bao Gu. She had never truly felt she had earned them herself, and so had never taken them to heart.
Deep down, she had always wanted to carve out a world by her own ability, to blaze a path that truly belonged to her.
Her stubborn pride, her need to prove herself, had driven her to stumble hard in the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range, dragging Bao Gu down with her and plunging both the rapidly expanding yet unstable Cleaver Gang and Xuantian Sect into a storm-tossed crisis.
And she knew very well that she was not Bao Gu.
She did not have Bao Gu’s gift for building and managing a power, did not have Bao Gu’s mind. When a problem appeared, her first instinct was always to use the sword in her hand to cut it down. She truly did not believe she could shoulder Cleaver Gang’s future.
Yu Mi’s heart was in chaos—lost, helpless.
She longed for Bao Gu to suddenly appear at her side, take her hand, and say, “Senior Sister, don’t be afraid.”
She longed for Bao Gu to appear at her side, wrap an arm around her waist, and call her “Senior Sister” in that soft voice.
She had always thought that her life out there in the wider world, her ability to fight and roam freely, was all due to her own strength. Only now did she realize that the reason she could ignore the tangled power struggles of the cultivation world, wander fearless and careless, unafraid of consequences, was because Bao Gu had always stood behind her, shielding her.
All these years, she had killed more people than she could count, her enemies scattered across the world, yet not once had she faced a massive, coordinated hunt from any great power. She had not even made it onto the Cleaver Rankings.
This was not because her combat strength was so overwhelming, but because behind her stood Bao Gu—the same Bao Gu who, on the day Yu Mi became Young Sect Master, took a single strike from a Wangxian Sect cultivator who came knocking for revenge, then went straight to Wangxian City and slaughtered it.
Bao Gu, for Yu Mi’s sake, killed her way into Wangxian Sect, turned Wangxian City into a slaughterhouse, and nearly transformed Wangxian Sect’s territory into a dead zone.
Bao Gu, for Yu Mi’s sake, killed the peerless great demon Rong Ruyu.
Bao Gu, for Yu Mi’s sake, took Ba and exiled both of them into the void.
Bao Gu had said she would protect Yu Mi completely.
Yu Mi had thought it was just sweet talk, a lover’s obsession and vow.
In reality, Bao Gu had always been behind her—shielding her, spoiling her.
Seeing Yu Mi’s grief-stricken, bewildered expression, Wang Ding did not know how to comfort her. He only told her that from now on, he would obey her orders as if they were the Lord’s own decrees. If the Arrow Envoy needed anything done, she had only to command him; he would do his utmost to carry it out perfectly.
Then he left the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range.
The mountain range was now an ominous, deadly place. He wanted to advise Yu Mi to leave, but one look at her and he knew it was useless. Yu Mi was like a wild goose that had lost its mate, hovering in confusion over the place where Bao Gu had vanished, not knowing where else to go.
Mobilizing a million cultivators to dig up the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range was a move of staggering scale.
All the major powers were already terrified of the mountain range. Almost no one dared to touch its affairs anymore.
If Yu Mi wanted to dig it up, Wang Ding could only use Cleaver Gang’s resources to rally the rogue cultivators.
Rogues were poor. For the sake of generous rewards in cultivation resources, they were willing to risk their lives. Most of those who flocked to dig were Foundation Establishment and Golden Core stage cultivators, with a large number of Qi Refining cultivators among them, and a small number of Nascent Soul stage cultivators.
Even after Ba left, the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range was still filled with uncountable monstrous creatures formed from condensed blood fiend energy and death qi by some mighty method. The deeper one went toward the mountain range’s center, the more numerous and terrifyingly powerful these strange monsters became.
Cleaver Gang and Xuantian Sect dispatched large numbers of elite forces to wipe them out, but it was like trying to empty the sea with a bucket. Kill one wave, and another appeared, then another, endlessly. They even frequently encountered monsters—or “cultivators”—with Void Tearing–level strength.
These Void Tearing “cultivators” lacked the refined spell control typical of the stage, but in terms of speed and raw power, they were fully equivalent to true Void Tearing experts. Even late Soul Formation cultivators struggled to stand against them.
Madman led Cleaver Gang’s elite troops.
Qu Yirou led the Soul Chasing Pavilion’s young pavilion master, two elders, and two thousand assassins to reinforce them.
But as more and more Void Tearing “cultivator” monsters appeared, the Yue Kingdom’s commander Si Ruo sent ten Void Tearing experts and a hundred thousand troops to aid them as well.
Ba’s disaster had wiped out the Yue Kingdom’s territory. Although the kingdom had taken over the former lands of the once–number one power, Holy Dao Sect, as a new base, they could not bear to abandon their homeland. They all dreamed of reclaiming the Yue Kingdom’s lost lands.
Yu Mi refused to wallow in grief.
She threw herself into the slaughter within the mountain range.
Wang Ding’s admonition had had some effect—she no longer dared to recklessly gamble her life. She agreed to let him assign her a personal guard detail.
When Jade Shura arrived in the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range, she immediately stuck close to Yu Mi.
Her master either did not act at all, or she would go straight for the monsters with Void Tearing–level strength. Jade Shura simply did not have the power to get close, so she might as well stick with Yu Mi. On the one hand, she could keep her company and try to ease her grief; on the other hand, it was safe at Yu Mi’s side.
Yu Mi had two hundred Soul Formation–stage guards with her, plus two Void Tearing–stage guest elders from Cleaver Gang, and a warship behind them that could open a domain gate at any time to let her escape. At the slightest sign of trouble, Jade Shura could follow Yu Mi and, sheltered by these people, dive into the domain gate at the first possible moment.
As for her master’s safety, Jade Shura was not worried in the slightest. Her master’s chariot had already been retrieved. With her master’s ability to escape, and that chariot in hand, if she truly encountered a danger she could not handle, she would absolutely run faster than Jade Shura herself.
While Yu Mi and the others were clearing out the bizarre monsters in the mountain range, the excavation work—carried out mostly by rogue cultivators—was in full swing. With a million people digging at once, the progress was astonishingly fast.
No one knew what Yu Mi wanted to dig up.
Even Yu Mi herself did not truly know what she was looking for.
Sometimes, in rare idle moments, she would ask herself: what is the point of digging like this?
Mobilizing so many, exhausting so much manpower and resources—every single day, just in wages for the rogue cultivators, they burned through ten million low-grade spirit stones.
In Bao Gu’s eyes, this would be nothing. Ten million low-grade stones converted into top-grade stones was only ten—barely enough for a pot of tea. But for any power in the cultivation world other than Bao Gu, it was an enormous expense.
Who else but Bao Gu, who had obtained a heaven-defying fortune, would casually brew ninth-rank saint tea with top-grade spirit stones every day and drink it like ordinary tea?
After half a month of digging, they suddenly discovered a river of blood.
And it was not just one.
The excavation of the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range followed the lines of the original nine dragon-shaped veins, digging in from nine directions at once. Progress in the nine areas was almost the same.
On nearly the same day, all nine digging directions discovered a river of blood.
These blood rivers lay buried deep in the earth veins beneath the mountain range. The entire network of nine dragon veins beneath the Desolate Ancient Mountain Range had turned into rivers of blood.
The “blood” inside was not fresh and red, but a foul, pitch-dark brown tainted with dense death qi. In the churning filth, bones floated and sank.
The vile miasma rising from the blood rivers gathered within the earth veins and condensed into vast quantities of earth fiend death qi.
The moment the blood rivers were first exposed, many rogue cultivators immediately fell under some malign influence, their eyes going dull as they stumbled straight into the bloody current and sank out of sight.
Cultivators with somewhat stronger cultivation rushed over, only to fish out remnants of bone wrapped in rotted flesh.
The strangest thing was that the blood rivers beneath the nine dragon veins all flowed uphill.
Water was supposed to flow downhill. Yet in these rivers, the foul blood flowed upward.
When Yu Mi received the news, she rushed to the site.
By the time she arrived, the rogue cultivators had already been driven back far from the blood river. Cleaver Gang and the Yue Kingdom’s elites had surrounded the exposed section.
Yu Mi understood a bit of formations, but her attainments in geomancy were not high. She could manage to choose auspicious terrain or use the momentum of the land to set up spirit-gathering formations, but when it came to this kind of filthy, ominous ground that geomancers usually avoided, she was at a complete loss.
Fortunately, the Demon Saint had warned her beforehand: no matter what they dug up, she was to report it at once.
So, upon seeing the blood river, Yu Mi contacted the Demon Saint through a sound-transmission jade slip and described exactly what she was seeing.
