Shen Yi rode the demon cloud to a desolate stretch of sloping ground.

A mountain of flesh, piled from demon corpses, came into view.

According to Lady Qinghua's report, Song Prefecture's cities weren't actually that large — one hundred and two county towns across the four prefectures, yielding a total of six hundred and thirty-six demons slain. There were too many carcasses even for the storage pouch, so they'd been temporarily piled here.

Compared to the Howling Moon Demon King, which had kept only a dozen-odd demon lords in tow, the Red-Eyed Demon King had clearly established a real foothold and made a name for itself — close to a thousand demons had come to serve under its banner. Even so, that averaged out to only six or seven demons per county town, enough to keep an entire county's worth of people in line.

Among these, awakened demons made up roughly sixty percent — over a hundred at the Threshold realm, several dozen at Jade Liquid, and sixteen at Condensate.

Worth keeping in mind that this was what remained after they'd slugged it out against both the Demon Suppression Division and the other demon king. That such numbers had survived was remarkable in itself.

A single small Jade Liquid-realm demon was enough to render over a hundred thousand people completely powerless to resist.

A Condensate-realm demon could simply lie back in the county magistrate's offices, and the mere fact of its presence was enough to ensure that martial warriors from a dozen surrounding counties didn't dare so much as think about running.

This kind of overwhelming, suffocating pressure didn't arise from nothing.

It would have taken countless lives as object lessons before the people of Song Prefecture were broken down into what they'd become today.

"Hah."

Shen Yi let out a quiet breath. When he'd seen that skull mounted on a pike outside the Demon Suppression General's residence, he'd found himself, for some reason, thinking of General Chen Qiankun.

He wasn't a man given to brooding sentiment.

But after witnessing what Song Prefecture had become, there was still a vague…