No one answered Bao Gu. Most people just stared at her in silence. Only a few cultivators stood up to speak, their words sounding lofty and righteous, but all of them were politely refusing to become slaves.
Bao Gu didn’t bother arguing with them.
She told Ba to open one of the cages and had Lou Wenfeng go in and drag someone out.
Lou Wenfeng wasn’t that strong. Inside that cage were several hundred cultivators, and even the formations they casually formed by standing together were enough to keep him from getting close.
Bao Gu let out a cold laugh and told Lou Wenfeng to come back out.
She walked to Ba’s side, pointed at the people in that cage, and said,
“The people in this cage don’t want to work and won’t obey. I don’t want them anymore. They’re all yours to throw into the pot for meat. The broth in the cauldron’s done simmering—it’s time to add flesh.”
Ba shot Bao Gu a sideways look, not at all happy about being used as a butcher on command. But then she glanced at the great cauldron, then at the several hundred walking meals in the cage.
She’d originally thought there wouldn’t be a single one left, and now suddenly there were several hundred people she could stew, and it would even be human flesh simmered together with ten‑thousand‑year treasures. With that kind of temptation in front of her, the small bit of reluctance she’d felt vanished into smoke.
The lure of stewed human flesh made her move at once. She opened the cage, grabbed a man by the collar, raised one hand to snap his neck and toss him into the pot—
“Wait!”
Bao Gu’s shout made Ba glare at her, eyes blazing.
“You want to go back on your word?”
Bao Gu said,
“Take out his guts and throw him in alive.”
Seeing Ba’s puzzled face, she added,
“It tastes better that way. The instant someone dies, their essence leaks away.”
The cultivator in Ba’s grip screamed in horror.
“No… no… no… don’t… I’ll be a slave, a servant… don’t eat me… I’m willing to be a slave, a servant…”
“Too late,” Bao Gu said coldly.
Ba neatly split him open from chest to belly. Her razor‑sharp claws reached in, scooped out his stomach and intestines in one handful, and flung them aside. The organs hit the ground still warm and twitching, grotesquely eye‑catching against the stone.
Without so much as blinking, she threw the man into the cauldron.
He tried to scramble out the instant he hit the broth, but the sealing force at the mouth of the cauldron blocked him completely. He couldn’t get past the lip.
Inside the cauldron he thrashed with all his might. The water, superheated by the earthfire below and roiling at a furious boil, scalded him so badly that he let out hoarse, tearing shrieks.
His primordial spirit tried to tear free of his body and flee, but the spirit was also shackled by the seal. Under the cauldron’s refining, his primordial spirit slowly melted away, bit by bit, into a golden divine liquid rich with pure life force and spiritual power, blending into the spirit broth.
He was cooked alive, little by little.
A cultivator’s vitality was terrifyingly tenacious. Even under such high temperature, he couldn’t die easily. He struggled in there for nearly the time it takes half a stick of incense to burn… then a quarter of an hour… then half an hour… only after about half an hour did he finally stop breathing.
One person was nowhere near enough for a cauldron that big.
Ba tossed three, four people in one after another. Only when the broth was almost overflowing did she finally stop. Three large, living men with their bellies slit open howled and struggled inside, until they were all boiled to death, cooked through…
Was Ba horrifying for eating people alive?
Yes. Horrifying.
But what Bao Gu just did was even more terrifying than Ba.
Everyone who saw this scene felt their guts turn to ice.
The people in that first cage nearly broke down. Some of them sobbed as they crawled to the bars, shouting that they were willing to be slaves and servants.
“Too late,” Bao Gu said, voice cold.
Then she told Ba to open the second cage.
Ba happily opened it, eyes shining as she stared at the people inside, just waiting for them to refuse to become Bao Gu’s servants so they could stay her food.
Under Ba’s predatory gaze, and with that giant cauldron of boiling human broth right behind her, the people in the cage nearly died of fright on the spot.
The moment the cage door opened, someone rolled and crawled all the way to Bao Gu’s feet, flattened himself to the floor, and, weeping and sniveling, shoved all the magic tools on his body forward.
“Don’t kill me… don’t cook me… I’m willing to be a servant, a slave…”
One cage after another was opened.
The people inside handed over every magic treasure on them. They also drew out a strand of life‑soul and heaven‑soul, sealed it into a soul plaque, and handed that to Bao Gu. Then they went to Lou Wenfeng on the side to be registered: their origins, sect, cultivation methods, specialties—everything was recorded one by one.
Some people with more scheming tried to hide things, stashing magic treasures inside their dantian to conceal them.
Bao Gu’s cultivation realm was too low. It was hard for her to notice the little tricks pulled by cultivators far above her in cultivation, so she didn’t notice anything wrong.
But Ba did.
Ba saw every tiny movement these people made. She didn’t say a word, though. She just hugged the cauldron, gnawing on fragrant human meat, smiling so brightly it was almost radiant.
Her grin was so happy that it felt eerie to everyone watching.
Even Bao Gu got goosebumps.
She asked,
“Did you pick up a pile of gold or something? What are you grinning at?”
Ba just smiled and didn’t answer.
Only after she finished eating all three of the cooked people in the cauldron did she wander back to the first cage, ready to grab more.
The cage exploded in desperate screams. Some people kowtowed to Bao Gu so frantically their heads were split and bleeding.
Bao Gu pretended not to hear.
They were already Ba’s rations. Did she dare try to steal food from Ba the glutton’s mouth? Was she that tired of living?
If she let those people go, how would she control the rest later?
Still, she did say to Ba,
“Go easy. Once you finish them, there won’t be any more.”
This whole method of cooking people up was her idea, but watching people be cooked and eaten like this still made her skin crawl. Besides, Ba had been eating people for so long, and in such quantities, that it was probably already a deeply rooted habit. If she went too long without human meat, she might not be able to bear it.
If Ba got a craving later and no one was there to stew humans for her, she’d absolutely turn on Bao Gu’s servants.
That would be trouble.
Ba said,
“No need to worry. There are still plenty.”
Bao Gu looked at her in confusion, with a hint of wariness.
“Plenty?”
“You don’t mind if I eat all the disobedient ones, right?” Ba asked.
Bao Gu nodded.
Ba clapped her hands in satisfaction and said, face full of contentment,
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
After thinking a moment, she still felt uneasy and asked,
“When I stew human meat in the future, you’ll keep giving me this many heavenly treasures, right?”
Bao Gu stiffly nodded.
Her heart was bleeding. At this rate, the cost of feeding Ba was astronomical. But to buy her over, she had no choice but to pay heavily.
With Bao Gu’s confirmation, Ba was in an excellent mood.
She waved her little hand.
“Go on, get busy. I’ll cook my meat myself. You don’t have to watch me.”
She reached straight into the cage, hauled someone out, split him open, scooped his guts out, and threw him into the cauldron.
New meat naturally called for new ingredients.
She had Bao Gu hand over another bunch of ten‑thousand‑year treasures to add into the broth.
Not seeing the ninth‑grade Ice Lotus, she muttered, dissatisfied,
“Missing a petal of lotus.”
Bao Gu handed over the entire ninth‑grade Ice Lotus.
“This is the only one. Make it last. Once it’s gone, there’s no more.”
Ba felt she was being very thrifty—she only broke off half a petal to toss into the cauldron.
Bao Gu had no idea exactly how many people Ba had captured, or how many she’d already eaten. She only knew that the ones Ba had locked up “for later” totaled over three hundred thousand.
Sorting all these people was an extremely tedious task. She had no one truly trustworthy to delegate it to, so she could only sit there and do it person by person herself.
Fortunately, the one thing she had plenty of now was time.
She separated those who had become servants from those who hadn’t, and locked them in different places. Then she further separated the servants by specialty: alchemists in one place, spirit‑wine brewers in another, artifact refiners in a third, and so on. She sorted them during registration and filed them all by category.
What she didn’t expect was that among them were spies from Shadowveil Pavilion, and they were exactly the ones Ba had grabbed not long ago when they came into the Archaic Mountain Range to investigate.
Bao Gu searched the soul memories of those few spies and confirmed that they were just unlucky underlings loyal to a gang called Kan Gang. She happened to be short on reliable people, so she assigned these six some managerial responsibilities.
There was no concept of time in this place, so Bao Gu made a sandglass for timing.
Even with the help of those six Shadowveil spies, it still took more than three months to fully sort and organize over three hundred thousand people.
The slow efficiency made Bao Gu deeply depressed and miss Wang Ding all over again. If Wang Ding were here, half a month would have been more than enough. Back when they migrated all the rogue cultivators to Qingzhou, he’d managed to settle that massive crowd in just half a month.
Over those three months, Ba used divine metal to forge herself a sword, a shield, and a full set of battle armor to wear.
The shield wasn’t large, about the length of a forearm. When it was done, Bao Gu watched Ba strap it to her arm and activate it. The shield flared with blinding light, forming a barrier in front of Ba. The power spread from the front of the shield across her entire body; the frontal defense was clearly the strongest, meant to block direct heavy blows, while the power enveloping the rest of her protected against shockwaves and stray attacks.
When not in use, Ba hung the shield at her waist next to her sword.
The divine‑metal battle armor was gorgeous. Calling it armor was a bit misleading—it was more like a long robe. The lines of the piece flowed like water, smooth and elegant, wrapping her perfectly. It hugged Ba’s figure so well that it made every curve stand out.
With her jade‑carved, doll‑like features wrapped in that sumptuous long‑robe armor, Ba looked like a porcelain doll wrapped in flower petals—luminous, delicate, beautiful enough to make people want to pinch her cheeks.
But they could only think it. No one would actually dare.
When Bao Gu saw Ba walk out in that beautiful battle robe, she finally understood why Ba refused to wear clothes before, and even disliked the outfits Bao Gu prepared for her.
Compared to Ba’s divine‑metal robe, every single thing she’d given Ba before was pure trash.
She really wanted a set like that for herself, but when she thought about how Ba had spent three whole months forging it, she knew it would be hard to get Ba to put in that much work for her.
Bao Gu stared in a daze at Ba in her stunning battle robe as Ba walked up, held out a hand, and asked her for ten jars of Monkey Wine.
Silently, she handed over three gourds of sixth‑grade Monkey Wine.
“Can you help me forge a robe like yours?” she asked. “Name your price.”
Ba’s eyes sparkled as she looked at Bao Gu.
“Trade it for the War God Sword.”
Bao Gu rolled her eyes and snorted.
“Hmph. I could just melt divine metal into the Xuantian Sword myself.”
Ba gave her a look like she was an idiot, then turned away and went to open a cage.
Panic and screams exploded inside.
Bao Gu was startled by her sudden movement.
“What are you doing?!”
Ba grabbed a cultivator at the Void Tearing stage, punched through his abdomen, and yanked her hand out. What came out was not intestines, but a life‑bound magic treasure and a storage artifact.
She glanced at Bao Gu.
“Didn’t you say I could eat the disobedient ones? You told them to hand over all their treasures. Does hiding things like this count as ‘not listening’?”
The Void Tearing cultivator was pinned under Ba’s hand, unable to move at all. His face had the lifeless gray of utter despair.
Bao Gu’s gaze swept over him, then around the cage. She saw a lot of cultivators wearing the same “we’re finished” expression, and quite a few collapsed to the floor on the spot.
She looked back at Ba.
“It counts. Give me their magic treasures, and the people are yours.”
Ba started grabbing them one by one, reaching into their bellies to pull out their hidden treasures, then throwing them into the cage she used for “rations.”
She moved like a ghost, fast enough that many people didn’t even realize what was happening until they were already stripped and tossed aside.
Bao Gu had spent three months organizing these people. Ba took less than the time it takes one stick of incense to burn to drag out nearly ten thousand.
Anyone capable of hiding treasures right under Bao Gu’s nose was at least mid to late Soul Formation stage or higher. Losing nearly ten thousand of that level at once was a brutal loss.
Bao Gu would be lying if she said her heart didn’t hurt.
But not too much.
If, at this point, they were still trying to play games, they were just asking to die. Keeping that kind around would only cause bigger trouble later.
What surprised her most was Ba.
Clearly Ba had seen through them from the start, but she’d kept quiet, waiting until Bao Gu finished sorting everyone before dragging them out in one sweep. If she’d exposed the first person the moment they hid something, who else would’ve dared stash away treasures afterward? She would never have gotten this many “rations.”
From this alone, Bao Gu gained a whole new understanding of Ba.
At the very least, Ba was not someone without scheming.
The remaining cultivators all fell completely silent, all thoughts of tricks crushed. Bao Gu had promised them a chance to live as servants. Ba had a cauldron behind her and was glaring at them like a predator.
Disobey even a little?
Get stewed.
No second chance.
Ba was delighted.
She could still eat people—better than before, even. Now the meat was stewed through with heavenly treasures and tasted amazing. This was far superior to the days when she’d just gnawed on raw flesh.
Her opinion of this war‑king royal who had once tricked her began to change for the better.
After a big meal, she went to find Bao Gu again.
“Hey, don’t call me Ba. I have a name.”
“What is it?” Bao Gu asked.
“…”
Ba fell silent.
Bao Gu looked at her, puzzled.
After a long pause, Ba said,
“I… haven’t remembered it yet.”
“…Then you’re still Ba,” Bao Gu said, speechless. “You’re the Heavenly Emperor’s daughter. How about Di Ba? Lady Ba? Imperial Ba?”
“…”
Ba tossed over her shoulder,
“Just call me Ba.”
Then she stalked off.
Once everything was settled, Bao Gu finally had time to sort through the “spoils of war” she’d collected.
The cultivators she’d captured were all rich. The saint artifacts they dug out of the Archaic Mountain Range, as well as the saint artifacts their factions had brought with them, were now all in Bao Gu’s possession. Everything in their storage treasures had likewise fallen into her hands.
While tallying and sorting out the loot, she controlled her vessel to race through the void, occasionally performing short‑range void jumps.
“Short range” only in terms of this endless void. In the cultivation world, a single one of these jumps would have taken her straight from the human realm to the demon realm.
The void was full of stars, but they were all too far away. Almost everything around her was empty nothingness. She could see those stars, but not touch them.
Forget stars—she rarely even encountered meteors. Only once in a while would a small cluster drift by, and she immediately sent people to fish them in for use.
Her personal wealth was considerable, but that was only enough on an individual scale. It was nowhere near enough to build an entire warship like her current vessel, something capable of crossing the void.
She could only proceed slowly, starting from what she had now.
She selected some rogue cultivators and sent them into Xuantian Mountain to open up herb gardens, orchards, and pastures.
In this void world, her cultivators had no way to replenish themselves from outside spiritual qi. They could only rely on food to take in enough energy to live. Bao Gu still needed them to work for her, so she couldn’t let them starve, or work themselves half‑dead.
As for Ba’s food supply, that absolutely had to be guaranteed. If Ba ever got truly hungry, she would eat people.
Herb gardens, orchards, livestock—those didn’t require many people. To support the living needs of three hundred thousand, given the work efficiency of Nascent Soul and above cultivators, three thousand were more than enough.
Most of the rest Bao Gu still kept locked in cages inside Ba’s Blood Prison world.
After a long string of coaxing and bribery, she finally got Ba to agree to eat only one person every half month.
Every half month, the people locked in the Blood Prison world had to watch Ba stew someone in the great cauldron. The “rations” went insane trying to escape their fate; the servants were tormented by constant fear. With no idea what Bao Gu’s next move would be, they were terrified of being downgraded to rations themselves, yet also too scared to do anything at all.
They could only wait and pray.
Two years passed like this—two years of drifting through the void.
Bao Gu dared say that in these two years, the “distance” she’d traveled through the void was tens of thousands of times the sum of everywhere she’d gone before.
Only after two years did she finally encounter a huge cluster of meteors floating in the void.
These meteors drifted along slowly, but there were countless of them. The largest one was bigger than the entire Qingzhou.
She swept them with her divine sense. No trace of life, but she did detect exactly what she needed—veins of ore, all kinds of ore.
There was no temperature in the void. These meteors were frozen rock‑solid, but the frozen soil was incredibly fertile and rich in minerals.
Her cultivation realm was low and her divine sense range limited, but even within that narrow range she found ore veins.
Bao Gu was ecstatic.
She had Ba release the “servants” from their cages and set them to work.
First she handed out formation materials and had those skilled in formations set up survival and defensive arrays across the meteors. She returned the life‑bound magic treasures of the stronger combat cultivators and put them in charge of security and patrols. Then she assigned people to mining and smelting.
After such a long period of confinement and mental torture, being let out to do physical labor felt like a heavenly favor.
The three hundred thousand scattered themselves across the meteor cluster and threw themselves into work.
It was their first time leaving the Blood Prison world. The sight that greeted them crushed any thought of escape.
Boundless void.
Even if someone somehow escaped Ba, there was nowhere to go.
Did they regret entering the Archaic Mountain Range to break the seals and seize the saint artifacts?
Of course they did.
If they hadn’t gone, they wouldn’t have freed Ba. They wouldn’t have been captured and brought to this state. They would still be living glamorous lives. Even if Xuantian Sect occupied the Archaic Mountains and rose to power, they’d still be sitting on their rich resources, living well.
But now, if Bao Gu wanted to kill them, it was as easy as crushing an ant.
Being allowed to mine ore—work done by the lowest‑ranked rogue cultivators—was actually a great blessing.
Did they complain?
Every time they thought of Ba cutting people open, yanking out their guts, and throwing them into the cauldron to be stewed with ten‑thousand‑year treasures, all complaints evaporated.
No matter how bitter or exhausting the work, they had no grievances. On the contrary, they worked themselves ragged, each trying their hardest to prove their worth, terrified that Bao Gu or Ba would decide they were useless and toss them into the cauldron as rations.
With over three hundred thousand cultivators, all of them talented and all of them desperate to work themselves to the bone, the results pleased Bao Gu greatly.
She had only one demand: hollow out every last one of these meteors and use them all.
More specifically, her goal was to mine these meteors and build a fleet of ships capable of traversing the void, inscribe formations on them that would mimic the four seasonal phenomena—wind, rain, thunder, and snow—and then on those ships plant spirit herbs, spirit plants, and raise spirit beasts and animals.
Use the first batch of meteor ships to sail onward, find more meteors, build more ships, go even farther, and look for more resources.
Maybe, someday, even without finding a place with the Nine‑Dragon Ascension geomantic layout, she could still gather enough resources from these drifting meteors to build a gate that could break through realms and carve out a path to escape.
Even if that failed, with a fleet of ships and three hundred thousand people as her foundation, at least she wouldn’t live too miserably in the void.
Everything progressed in an orderly fashion.
Bao Gu was extremely relaxed; there was almost nothing that needed her direct involvement.
All she had to do was occasionally check the mining progress, or from time to time deal with Ba, who liked to wander over with or without a reason.
The rest of her time, she devoted entirely to cultivation.
But as time went on, she missed people more and more.
She missed Yu Mi, Saint Aunt, Little Martial Aunt, Grandmaster, Martial Uncle Feng, the Senior Nanshan she’d barely seen since entering Xuantian Sect, Jade Shura, the master of Soul Chasing Pavilion—everyone she’d ever known.
She knew she could never go back.
Even if, one day, she found a way to return to the cultivation world, she could not go back.
Here in the void, she and Ba stood on the same side. Even if they reached the upper realm someday, they might still be allies.
But the moment they returned to the cultivation world, they would become mortal enemies—for one simple reason: Ba needed to refine Saint Aunt to fully revive, and Bao Gu would never allow that.
Back in the cultivation world, Ba would have endless ways to obtain spirit herbs and treasures, and she could eat people freely without a second thought—people as countless as the sands. There would always be someone to cook for her.
And the first person she would wipe out… would almost certainly be Bao Gu.
