Bao Gu froze for a moment, thinking to herself,
“How can it be from the flagship encampment? Weren’t all three hundred thousand troops there taken out by Yu Mi?”
Then she jolted to her feet with a sharp swish.
The three hundred thousand troops from the Gold-Armored Army’s main camp had been led away. Right now, wasn’t that camp completely empty…
Bao Gu’s sudden movement scared everyone in the hall. Quite a few people thought secretly,
“The Mad Demon really did attack!”
All eyes immediately turned to Bao Gu to see her reaction.
Bao Gu raised her hand and flicked out a magical tool that linked to the flagship’s grand formation. With a wave, the tool rose into the air and spilled out a projection, connecting to the flagship’s control formation.
She guided the treasure to hook into the flagship’s main control room—only to see a figure in pitch-black armor standing there: the Mad Demon.
Around him clustered a group of generals and formation masters. On the ground nearby lay several dozen corpses—some were formation masters in charge of operating the main control formation. Judging by the way they died, someone had tried to forcibly soul-search them, triggered the prohibitions, and blown out their spirit platforms; their skulls had exploded. The others were guards who had been responsible for watching various gates. Every wound was a one-hit kill.
Those guards were all Nascent Soul cultivators. Up against close-range surprise attacks from Divine Transformation and above—there were even Void Tearing and Tribulation Crossing cultivators among them—they hadn’t had the slightest power to resist.
The Mad Demon and the formation masters and generals beside him were currently fiddling with the main control formation.
The Qingzhou grand formation had been stirred because the flagship’s main control formation had been activated, releasing a powerful surge of energy. That in turn had awakened the defensive power of the Qingzhou formation—only, instead of protecting the flagship, it had locked down the space surrounding it!
The moment Bao Gu’s tool linked to the flagship’s main control formation, she saw the Mad Demon. Through the array, the Mad Demon naturally saw Bao Gu as well. He paused, then called out,
“Command Lord!”
He cupped his fists in a deep bow toward Bao Gu’s projected image.
“I pay my respects to the Command Lord.”
From Bao Gu’s reaction, he was sure she could see him clearly.
Bao Gu asked,
“You’re rebelling?”
The Mad Demon said,
“Subordinate merely seeks a path to live.”
Bao Gu asked,
“Did I ever say I was going to kill you?”
The Mad Demon replied,
“The Command Lord has already made her move. Whether you kill me or not—what difference is there? I beg the Command Lord to let this subordinate leave this domain and fend for myself!”
His words were sincere, but his intention to leave was rock-solid.
Bao Gu swept the flagship via the tool’s link to the formation and saw all its gangways flung open. Of his eight hundred thousand troops, more than half had already boarded the ship, and the remaining portion were still pouring in through various doors.
Eight hundred thousand soldiers, plus those personal followers who would definitely cling to the Mad Demon—altogether well over a million…
Bao Gu’s eyes went red on the spot. She ground her teeth and snarled,
“Over a million people. You plan to drag all of them to die with you?”
The Mad Demon said,
“The Command Lord was able to cross the void alive. This subordinate can likewise lead them to carve out a path in the void.”
Back then, the Command Lord had only had three chariots and still made it back alive. Now he’d seized the Command Lord’s Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship; everything on board was fully stocked. How could they not survive?
Everyone in the hall was dumbstruck.
Who would have thought the Mad Demon would seize the Gold-Armored Army’s entire encampment while the Enforcer was out with them hunting people, and even take control of the Command Lord’s Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship.
He clearly meant to sail off in the Command Lord’s flagship and vanish into the distance to found a new world for himself.
Someone sighed inwardly:
High. Truly high. Courage and cunning both, and guts to match.
It was a desperate gambit, but… it was about to succeed, wasn’t it?
Everything depended on whether that Da Luo Scarlet Gold ship could shake off the Qingzhou grand formation’s control. They said this Da Luo Scarlet Gold ship could break through domains and cross the void. If that were true, perhaps not even the Command Lord could stop the Mad Demon.
Quite a few people in the hall snuck glances at the Command Lord, only to see her face iron-blue, laced with heartache.
Bao Gu asked,
“And if you can’t? Are you going to take these million people to the grave with you?”
“If the Da Luo Scarlet Gold ship could cross a great world, why would I have spent countless effort to build a world-breaking gate? If the Da Luo Scarlet Gold ship could cross worlds, why would the Demon Emperor of the Beast Domain, back then, have exhausted his entire life building a domain gate?”
“Do you know what happens once you enter the void and you can’t replenish food or energy?”
“I’ll tell you. It’s people eating people.”
“It’s mutual slaughter. Human nature twisted into madness. For a mouthful of food they’ll gladly sell their lives, sell themselves into slavery and servitude like it’s sweet.”
“There are still guards left alive on the flagship. I don’t believe you killed them all. Soul-search them. See what they went through. Ask them where the food they ate in the void came from.”
“The flagship has a large store of mineral resources, but its provisions are only enough to keep three hundred thousand Nascent Soul cultivators alive for ten years.”
The Mad Demon asked quietly,
“Command Lord, do I still have a road back? Is there any other path for me? Command Lord… from the moment you and the Enforcer made your move, this subordinate no longer had a choice.”
Eight hundred thousand troops, supplies, and the elite forces of several dozen branches of Kan Gang would all die with the Mad Demon in the void. Just thinking of it made Bao Gu feel like her heart was bleeding.
For Kan Gang, this would be a colossal loss.
Yet from the current situation, these million-plus people were willing to follow the Mad Demon. Their loyalty was obviously to him. As for her…
Even if she kept them, she wouldn’t dare use them with any peace of mind.
But in the end, they were still over a million living people.
Bao Gu’s heart sank like an abyss. These million-plus lives were laid out in front of her.
Should she let them take her Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship and head into the void to die miserably?
Or should she wipe them out here and now?
While Bao Gu hesitated in heavy silence, one of the formation masters who’d been studying the flagship’s formation accidentally triggered the attack controls of the main formation.
In an instant, a world-annihilating aura erupted from the direction of the distant Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship. The force that the Qingzhou grand formation had been using to imprison space was forcibly blasted open. The power was so immense it twisted space itself. The Qingzhou grand formation exploded with defensive power; even after shedding most of the impact, the shock made the earth quake and mountains sway, and all of Qingzhou shook violently…
From that aura alone, Bao Gu knew exactly which attack treasure had been triggered.
She hurriedly shifted the projection outside the Da Luo Scarlet Gold ship.
The troops and various units still boarding the ship were already dust and smoke under that blast. The side hatches slammed shut the moment the attack initiated. The people just reaching the gangways were crushed alive by the closing doors.
Those directly underneath were flattened into sludge. A few severed arms, legs, and heads were squeezed out from under the door seams. Blood and flesh sprayed beneath the doors.
As for those outside the hatches…
They, together with the entire encampment, were blown into ash. The ground within several zhang was blasted flat and turned into molten slag…
Everyone in the hall went pale at the sight of the carnage.
Bao Gu cut the view back to the main control hub through her tool—there, the Mad Demon was shouting,
“What’s going on? What’s going on? What happened!?”
Sensing the disturbance in the array, he turned his head and met Bao Gu’s gaze. Her eyes were cold, rimmed red, and locked on him. That look was so chilling it made his heart clench.
All his life, the Mad Demon had never feared anyone. Yet Bao Gu’s gaze now was like that of a ghost from the deepest hell, indescribably terrifying.
One of the formation masters stammered,
“Right Envoy, th-this… the structure of this control array is too complicated…”
The Mad Demon seized one of the main formation masters by the collar and roared,
“Activate the formation and get us out of here right now, or I’ll make you envy the dead!”
That formation master lifted his head and looked toward Bao Gu.
The Mad Demon said coldly,
“Your Command Lord is too far away. She can’t help you. She can’t save you.”
The formation master saw Bao Gu give him a small nod.
His hands moved with lightning speed. He slapped his palm down on the “Separation” control treasure right before him.
The “Separation” control treasure consisted originally of ten segments; in an instant he pressed them all the way down to the base—this represented full-ship separation.
As that treasure sank into the control array and locked into place, power surged out through the formation and flashed through the entire vessel. All the hatches in every section of the ship lit up and began to close.
The Right Envoy’s troops stationed at various section gates inside the flagship hurriedly backed away from the doors that were slowly shutting, confused.
At some hatches, the original guards hadn’t been killed. They were grabbed and dragged forward.
“What’s going on?”
A guard looked up at the sigils inscribed on the hatch and said,
“This is a separation seal.”
One of the Right Envoy’s men asked, baffled,
“What does that mean?”
The guard explained,
“Our flagship is made of many sections, combined into a single huge ship. Right now our section is about to detach from the main ship, so the hatches are sealing.”
“It’s said each section has its own formation control room, but…”
“But what?”
The guard pointed not far away.
“You see how that area has no door open? That means, before we detached, the main control room didn’t open the way to our local control room.”
A Right Envoy soldier clamped a hand on the guard’s shoulder.
“And what does that mean for us?”
The guard said,
“Brother, without an open door we can’t get into the control room, so we can’t control the ship. You’re not going anywhere.”
“This whole ship was personally overseen and forged by the Command Lord. I heard she installed a huge number of teleportation arrays inside. She can teleport to any section of the ship whenever she wants. If she comes up to deal with you, it’ll be in an instant.”
“My advice? Surrender. With this many people, she won’t kill you all…”
“Surrender my ass! Is there any other way to open the door? Speak!”
“There is! Blast it! Smash through the defensive formation, then blast through that three-chi-thick Da Luo Scarlet Gold hatch and you can get into the control room! When you’re blasting the defensive formation, be careful not to… not to trigger the main control formation’s self-destruct mechanism. Otherwise it’ll cause a self-detonation, and the explosion will turn all of us into ash in an instant…”
Back in the main control room, the moment the Mad Demon saw Bao Gu give that nod, his heart sank.
He had thought the formation master was about to self-detonate, so he’d guarded himself first—only for the man to slap his palm onto a segmented, cylindrical jade pillar at his side, driving it all the way down and sealing it perfectly into the sigil-covered platform.
The Mad Demon swept his divine sense out and only felt a wave of energy ripple away through the formation. He immediately pushed his divine sense toward the outside of the ship, but found it blocked by the array, so he turned to look at a view-port that showed the situation outside.
He saw the enormous Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship disintegrate in an instant, coming apart into nearly a thousand oddly shaped, differently sized pieces that floated apart in the sky…
The Mad Demon’s heart plummeted into the abyss. In his head, one word resounded:
“Defeat.”
Still unwilling to accept it, he grabbed the formation master—whose cultivation had already been sealed—by the neck.
“Follow me and I’ll give you high rank and heavy responsibilities. Is this how badly you want to die?”
The formation master replied,
“The Command Lord holds my soul tablet. If she wishes me dead, a single finger twitch will do it. Even if she spares me and I follow you into the void, I’m still dead. You haven’t seen how terrifying the void is. I have.”
The Mad Demon’s fist crashed down on the man’s head.
The formation master’s skull burst like a watermelon. The Mad Demon flicked brain and blood from his hand, then glared at Bao Gu with vicious, bloodshot eyes.
“Command Lord, your subordinates are loyal to you unto death and refuse to surrender. I believe with your wealth, you won’t mind me taking… this little bit that’s left.”
“After all, training such a group of formation masters isn’t easy, is it?”
He jerked a thumb behind him.
“Hand over the method to control this formation, and I’ll let them go. How about it?”
Bao Gu’s voice was ice.
“You killed my people in front of me and now you want to negotiate?”
The Mad Demon said,
“Command Lord, there are still more than thirty formation masters here. I see every one of them is loyal to you. Are you not going to ransom them?”
Bao Gu looked at him.
“Mad Demon, when Kan Gang was first founded, you were there at my side. We built this up together step by step. Kan Gang’s foundation was laid by Wang Ding, Sun Dilong, and you—the three of you helping me through blood and sweat.”
“Especially you. You charged into battle again and again. You faced more danger than anyone.”
“If you truly wanted to strike out on your own, I would let you go. That has always counted, and it always will. I, Bao Gu, am not someone who breaks my word, nor someone who forgets old comrades when I rise high, discarding them like hunting bows after the birds are gone.”
The Mad Demon asked,
“Command Lord, with your power and position today, if I leave Kan Gang to stand on my own, that’s only postponing my death. You may not pursue me, but there are plenty who will.”
“If I keep following you, you’ll strip my military command and cut away my strength. I have too many enemies. Without great power to rely on, I won’t live long…”
Bao Gu let out a short laugh.
“Mad Demon, you’re afraid. You no longer trust your own strength. You hold power today, but your heart has turned timid. You no longer believe your own fists can protect you.”
“You’ve sat in authority too long and lost the heart that charges ever forward. If you go on like this, your future path of cultivation is as good as ruined.”
She paused, then went on,
“You think that just by taking the Da Luo Scarlet Gold ship you can leave this world and carve out a new domain?”
“I’ll tell you: the cosmos has layers upon layers of worlds without number. As of now, we only know of ten stable great worlds that neighbor this one.”
“Without coordinates for a domain, if you blindly rush out of this great world, what awaits you is a realm saturated with destructive energy.”
“You want to go, I won’t stop you. But don’t drag all the people who follow you into that risk, into the grave with you.”
“The more people, the greater the consumption. That burden is beyond what you can bear.”
“Leave the flagship. I’ll give you a hundred-zhang warship capable of breaking through worlds, and a domain chart. Prepare five thousand people and provisions for a thousand years. Take your closest followers and go.”
The Mad Demon saw Bao Gu say this openly in front of all the senior personnel of Kan Gang behind her, and seven-tenths of him believed her. He was also tempted.
He couldn’t control the Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship. His men were now scattered across detached sections. He had already lost his greatest bargaining chip.
He had already lost.
Now, to be offered even a sliver of hope—Bao Gu’s terms were more than acceptable.
He asked,
“Command Lord, are these words true?”
Bao Gu said,
“My words are always carried out.”
She suddenly thought of how she’d tricked Qing Ying and silently added in her heart, “You’re not Qing Ying, after all.”
Then she thought again that it was a very inappropriate thing to be thinking at a time like this.
With everyone watching, hearing Bao Gu say this was enough to settle the Mad Demon’s heart. In the cultivation world, it was common knowledge the Command Lord did what she said. She wouldn’t slap her own face by breaking her word here.
“Good,” the Mad Demon said.
The word had barely left his mouth when Bao Gu’s projected figure suddenly vanished from the formation ahead of him.
The people in the hall saw the treasure still floating in the air, projection still spilling out. A faint ripple of power spread from beneath the Command Lord’s feet—and then she disappeared.
In the next breath they were stunned to see the Command Lord appear behind the Mad Demon.
The Mad Demon spun around in shock, staring like he’d seen a ghost as Bao Gu appeared on the flagship.
He’d checked after boarding—this ship was sealed tight by the formation; the teleportation arrays couldn’t be used to get up here.
“You… how did you get up here?” he blurted.
Then he saw the sigil pattern beneath Bao Gu’s feet: a teleportation array etched into the flagship itself.
He had clearly checked this place and found no teleportation array. So this had been hidden before?
Fear seized his heart.
“They say Wang Ding’s cunning is nearly demonic and call him the Ghostly Scholar,” he thought, “but I think the Command Lord is the truly terrifying one…”
He suddenly felt he’d been the real fool all along.
Such an important, powerful thing as the Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship—how could the Command Lord not have prepared a backhand against someone seizing it?
She dared to send the Gold-Armored Army out with no guards left behind—could it be she hadn’t prepared for someone to wipe out their encampment?
Driven to this point, he had nowhere left to retreat. Instinctively, he wanted to draw his blade for one final desperate clash with the Command Lord—then he remembered how she had snatched Zi Yunshu out of midair in one move, and how she had just offered him a way out.
His expression twisted.
“Do the Command Lord’s words from just now still count?” he asked hoarsely.
Bao Gu gave a small nod.
She walked over, took out a treasure, and collected the Nascent Soul and soul of the formation master whose head the Mad Demon had smashed. Then she went to the main seat in the control room.
She swung her sleeve, sending a wave of power into a floor tile. The tile flipped over, and a four-chi long, three-chi wide platform covered in engraved sigils rose from the floor.
Bao Gu took out something like a jade seal and placed it in the recess at the center. She linked her divine sense to the seal, and through it to the grand formation.
Using the connections between formations, she drew back the detached compartments that stored the Da Luo Scarlet Gold warships, as well as all the sections connected along the way, returning them to their original positions. She opened those holds, called out one Da Luo Scarlet Gold hundred-zhang warship, and opened its grain stores, letting the Mad Demon send his own people to move rations.
Then she took out a storage treasure and pulled large quantities of food from the treasury in the Xuantian Mountains, filling it until the flagship’s grain stores met the required amount.
She carved the coordinates and brief descriptions of various worlds into a jade slip and put it into the storage treasure, then tossed the treasure to the Mad Demon.
He caught it and scanned it with his divine sense. For a moment his heart was a tangle of emotion.
If the Command Lord had wanted his life, she could have taken it the instant she’d suddenly appeared on the deck. She had the cultivation and the power to do it.
Only now did he truly understand that she had never once intended to kill him.
He dropped to his knees and kowtowed three times, each bang ringing.
“This subordinate was muddle-headed and has wronged the Command Lord.”
Bao Gu looked at him.
“Entering the void is ten deaths for every one life. That’s not an empty phrase.”
“Once you break out of this world, if you’re lucky, you’ll enter a stable great world. If you can hang on, you’ll eventually find a way to live.”
“If you’re unlucky and land in a place saturated with destruction… then accept your fate.”
With that, she reassembled all the disintegrated parts of the Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship, then said to the Mad Demon,
“Pick out the five thousand you’re taking and go.”
The Mad Demon kowtowed again, hard.
“If I survive, and if someday I meet the Command Lord again, I will stake my life to repay this debt.”
He knocked his head on the ground one more time and added,
“The ones I’m taking are all my loyal subordinates. The rest who remain… were only ever following orders from above.”
Bao Gu only said coolly,
“I have my own plans.”
The Mad Demon bowed deeply once more, then gathered his trusted men and led them aboard the hundred-zhang Da Luo Scarlet Gold warship floating outside.
Entering its control chamber, he discovered that its operation was more or less the same as the hundred-zhang warships of the cultivation world. Only a few controls were different; one of those he had already recognized from the earlier carnage, and he managed to roughly understand the rest by trial and guesswork.
Bao Gu watched the Mad Demon’s group board and activate the warship’s main control formation. She lifted the spatial lockdown of the Qingzhou grand formation, then saw the hundred-zhang vessel ram through the world barrier and plunge into the void filled with astral winds and destructive force…
She was furious with the Mad Demon. Because of his move, Kan Gang had suffered a terrible loss. That single bombardment from the flagship had annihilated two or three hundred thousand troops still boarding—nearly all Divine Transformation cultivators.
Just like that, gone…
But in the end, he was someone who had once risked his life for her.
She couldn’t bring herself to kill him.
Wang Ding could finally relax. Sun Dilong too. If the Mad Demon could live through all this, and they themselves had now been reinstated and entrusted with heavy responsibilities, then as long as they served faithfully from here on, the Command Lord would not treat them poorly.
Everyone in the hall had watched the entire spectacle through the treasure Bao Gu left hovering there. Their own hearts finally settled as well.
They hadn’t been taken away by the Enforcer, they were still standing in this hall, and now the Command Lord had done all this. Obviously their future treatment would be better than before.
But the Mad Demon’s end, and the Command Lord’s earlier words about “holding power, yet letting your heart grow timid and thereby cutting off your own path of cultivation,” also served them as a warning.
Power could earn you better cultivation resources—but if you lusted after power too much, it was easy to lose yourself and sever your own path.
The mortal world tempers the heart indeed.
Once the Mad Demon left, the troops he’d left behind were completely at a loss. One by one, they threw down their weapons and surrendered.
With the commander gone, what rebellion was there to talk about?
Bao Gu continued to keep them confined aboard the flagship. When she returned to the hall, she brought together the generals under Wang Ding and Sun Dilong, and completely scrambled and reorganized all the armies.
The army types remained the same, but every top commanding officer all the way down to direct superiors and even comrades-in-arms were swapped.
Because everything had been shuffled, coordination was a mess. Many didn’t work well together, so they were all assigned to various major camps for intensive drills.
Yu Mi received news of the Mad Demon’s rebellion and rushed back at top speed with her troops for reinforcements—only to find Bao Gu had already “pacified the rebellion” and was in the middle of mixing different armies together for recomposition.
The five Gold-Armored Armies she personally led were reassigned by Bao Gu to the Shadow City encampment to take over its defense.
Most of those soldiers were only at the Nascent Soul stage…
Bao Gu also raised their treatment, giving them more cultivation resources so they could push higher in realm. After all, this unit was effectively a “forbidden army.” It was extremely rare for them to ever encounter a chance to earn military merit by fighting their way to Qingzhou’s main base.
So they could only rely on their pay and resources to cultivate.
When the news spread that the Mad Demon had seized the Gold-Armored Army’s encampment yet been pacified by Bao Gu alone, factions all over refused to believe it.
Even those in the hall who had personally witnessed everything, once they thought back on it later, felt that the Mad Demon had thrown his life away in a tragic farce.
But then again, who among them hadn’t thought, when they first saw the Mad Demon seize the Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship, that he was bold, wise, decisive, and willing to risk everything?
Who could have guessed that the Command Lord would suddenly appear aboard the flagship and take control—and that the flagship would be so hard to operate? The Mad Demon had held the flagship for so long, yet his formation masters had never even managed to start it properly…
Then there was what the Command Lord did afterward. Many began to suspect that without whatever command tokens or authority seals she held, the flagship simply could not be sailed away.
According to the Right Envoy’s troops who’d been imprisoned on the flagship, once the hatches shut, all those left inside were like dogs locked in a yard. There was nowhere to run, and rumor had it there were self-destruction mechanisms buried inside…
After this, everyone understood: don’t touch the flagship.
Heaven only knew how many backups and traps the Command Lord had left aboard that thing.
When Bao Gu heard all the rumors, she felt quite wronged.
All she’d done was keep the critical formations firmly in her own hands. And when she was building the flagship she’d naturally installed emergency teleportation arrays all over the place to save her own life.
For a place as important as the main control room, how could she not set up several hidden teleportation arrays in and out? Otherwise she’d be playing with both her own life and the flagship itself.
Yu Mi had no time to care about those rumors.
She had two massive headaches right now. One was Bao Gu putting her in charge of guarding the Five-Element Immortal Stones.
The other was that they’d arrested too many people in this great purge, and those arrested were entangled with nearly every power in the realm. Kill any one of them and you’d offend an entire nest. Kill them all and she might as well stand against the entire cultivation world.
She couldn’t just let them go. They’d embezzled and devoured far too much and hadn’t spat any of it back out yet. Behind these people were the factions who’d benefited through them. All that had to be dug out through them.
No matter how careful she’d been, there was no way she could have uncovered everything beforehand. Now that they were in custody, they all had to be interrogated again. And these were only the ones sitting in key positions—there were still plenty of fish that had slipped the net to investigate.
Once the interrogations were done, she’d have to negotiate with all those powers and see which of them were willing to protect their people.
If they were, then there would be talks and bargaining. They’d have to give up benefits and show real sincerity if they wanted to save anyone.
Of course, if a faction abandoned one of these people and refused to protect them, Yu Mi’s life became easier.
Once questioning was over, if the prisoner had no power to protect themselves and no one had stepped forward on their behalf before the time limit, then they would all be dragged to the square in Shadow City and—crack—beheaded.
For a time, the gates of Yu Mi’s Enforcer’s Mansion were nearly trampled flat by representatives from all sides. She was run absolutely ragged. She split herself, separating true body and primordial spirit, sending both out at once—and it still wasn’t enough.
Everyone she could use was being used. But there was no getting around the sheer number of people this purge had netted. The prisons of all twenty cities of Qingzhou were full, and a large number of detainees were being kept temporarily on the Da Luo Scarlet Gold flagship, enjoying the treatment of super-luxury prison cells.
Bao Gu saw Yu Mi working around the clock and initially wanted to transfer Wang Ding over to help. But Wang Ding had been deeply involved in all this and was busy recruiting craftsmen to build the world-breaking gate formations and the gate itself. So she dropped the idea.
Bao Gu herself was busy modifying the formation diagram for the gate. The formation was extremely profound and complex; she couldn’t afford any distractions.
Seeing Yu Mi bargaining endlessly with representatives of all sorts of factions, arguing like they were pulling taffy, Bao Gu grew annoyed and contacted Qing Ying through a sound-transmission jade.
Her plan was to have Yu Mi state her asking price and Qing Ying handle the haggling. Whoever tried to cut lower than Yu Mi’s bottom line, Qing Ying could just flip the table on them. With her reputation, she didn’t need to fear offending people. She was perfect for playing the black face.
But when Bao Gu contacted Qing Ying, it was her master’s wife’s voice that answered.
“Looking for Qing Ying? You’ll have to wait a while.”
Bao Gu blinked.
“Where’s Qing Ying?”
“In the cauldron, stewing,” Xue Qing said.
“…”
Even without seeing Bao Gu, Xue Qing could more or less picture her expression and confusion. She added,
“Your precious disciple opened that lion’s mouth of hers, wanting me to remodel the little world inside the Heaven-Refining Cauldron and fill it to the brim with spiritual treasures and rare herbs. That was clearly not serious business.”
“I saw her reeking of blood and death, swallowing her saliva every time she looked at Xiaolian, so I threw her into the cauldron to stew for a few dozen days. I’ll refine all that blood and death out of her. That’ll count as payment for her returning that pile of divine metal and for the effort of refining it into treasures.”
“…”
Bao Gu stared blankly for a moment, then asked,
“What do you mean, ‘returning the divine metal’?”
“Who sealed Qing Ying?” Xue Qing countered.
Bao Gu thought about it.
“Seems like it was a senior from the Beast Domain who descended from the upper realm…”
Then a thought struck her.
“That divine metal came from the Beast Domain?”
“Not completely stupid,” Xue Qing said.
Bao Gu felt a bit lost.
“A senior from the Beast Domain went to all that trouble just to help the heavens seal Qing Ying?”
“It doesn’t really count as helping the heavens,” Xue Qing said. “Back then, this realm’s cultivators and the demon race joined forces against the drought fiends. The demons suffered huge losses. Seeing the fiends ravaging the land, they had no choice but to invite a compassionate Demon Saint to descend.”
“With the Prison-Breaking Blood Lotus as bait, the Nine Dragons Ascension Array as the formation, and divine metal forged into chains and a coffin, they finally managed to seal Qing Ying.”
She paused, then continued,
“That Demon Saint, in order to deal with Qing Ying, used her own essence blood as a guide to form a pair of twin lotus seeds. One became the Prison-Breaking Blood Lotus. The other was the World-Purifying Holy Lotus.”
“She has already fallen. The Prison-Breaking Blood Lotus is also gone. Only the bloodline passed down through the World-Purifying Holy Lotus remains.”
Bao Gu sucked in a breath.
“Master’s meaning is that the senior from the Beast Domain who descended from the upper realm was a Demon Saint of the Beast Domain—and she was Saint Aunt’s mother?”
Xue Qing made a small sound.
“You could call her a mother, I suppose.”
Lotuses had no concept of male and female. Though it was still a continuation of life, certain demon clans passed life on in ways very different from the human race and their male-female mating.
Knowing Bao Gu was human and prone to that kind of thinking, she didn’t mind the term. It was close enough.
“Alright, I’m not going to go into Beast Domain affairs with you,” she said, changing the subject. “Give it some time and I’ll return Qing Ying to you.”
Bao Gu asked dully,
“Master, Qing Ying wasn’t afraid you’d cook and eat her and still went into your Myriad Spirits True Cauldron?”
Xue Qing chuckled.
“You think she agreed? Of course not. I waited till she was talking a mile a minute, spittle flying while she tried to swindle me, then dropped the Myriad Spirits True Cauldron over her head and scooped her up.”
As she spoke, she glanced at the large cauldron at her side.
Fortunately it was the Demon Emperor’s dao-proving imperial artifact, tempered for ages beyond counting. Otherwise it would have been smashed to pieces long ago by Qing Ying, who was inside flailing desperately and hammering it with the Heaven-Refining Cauldron.
She’d been locked in there for so many days, and still hadn’t thrashed enough.
“You think you’re getting out?” Xue Qing thought. “Save your strength. Unless your own father is alive to hold the cauldron from the outside for you to smash at, you’re not getting anywhere.”
And if it were Qing Ying’s father, she wouldn’t dare pull this stunt no matter what.
Bao Gu suddenly felt that sending Qing Ying to find her master’s wife had been pushing her disciple straight into a fire pit.
That guileless Qing Ying was no match for her master’s wife at all.
