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 discomfort settled somewhere in his chest.
And what made it even more absurd was this:
Among demons, the Red-Eyed Demon King’s way of feeding was actually considered almost “merciful” — it subsisted on accumulated faith rather than fresh blood, letting its subordinate demons feed in a regulated fashion, just enough to maintain that heart-stopping dread in the people’s minds, that feeling that their lives could be forfeit at any moment.
Something more decisive in its methods might have meant Song Prefecture never lasting to today at all — eaten clean down to nothing long since.
Sure enough — a minor creature is always a minor creature.
Even having acquired strength beyond anything ordinary people could imagine, Shen Yi still couldn’t manage the serene detachment of the War Temple’s seasoned veterans — using the world as a game board, regarding lives lost and traded as so many pieces exchanged.
In the fight with the Red-Eyed Demon King earlier, with each fist he’d driven down, he’d felt himself back in Liuli Temple Village, plunging a steel blade into that dog demon’s heart, over and over, expending on the violence the small knot of anger in his chest.
Shen Yi gave his head a slight shake, and settled his mind back into order quickly.
His eyes went cold. He opened his mouth and rendered the towering pile of flesh before him into a river of blood — six or seven hundred savage-faced demons swiftly reduced to shriveled husks.
The river of blood gathered in midair, condensing at visible speed into demon blood.
From the sky a wash of vivid crimson — and once it deepened to dark red and finished concentrating… only four drops of demon blood were left to pass into Shen Yi’s mouth.
“…”
Not even enough to sustain a single all-out exchange by the path infant.
But that wasn’t where their real value lay.
Shen Yi raised his eyes to the panel, and that string of numbers, extravagant beyond all proportion, made even his heartbeat quicken just slightly.
【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 94,600 years】
Of that, only the eleven thousand-odd years from the four Core-Nurturing demon lords, plus the seven thousand-plus from the Red-Eyed Demon King, were Shen Yi’s own kills.
Everything else was Lady Qinghua’s handiwork.
Shen Yi called her soul out, and the woman in her blue-flower-patterned long dress drifted up lightly beside him.
“Go look around the outskirts of Song Prefecture. See if there are any that got away.”
“Qinghua obediently follows Master’s divine command.”
Lady Qinghua’s face was deathly pale, but without the slightest objection she bowed with proper respect, returned swiftly to the divine spirit, and carried it drifting away into the distance.
Shen Yi gathered up the scattered beast essence stones and demon cores scattered across the ground, then drew out the Core-Nurturing demon lords’ and the Red-Eyed Demon King’s corpses.
The Blood-Transmuting divine ability came into play again.
A moment later, twenty-three drops of demon blood floated free from the four demon lords — by the count, their strength had been only marginally below the Junior Demon King’s. The ones that had survived the three-way bloodbath really had been something.
The Red-Eyed Demon King, by contrast, left Shen Yi mildly disappointed — fifty-seven drops of demon blood, nowhere close to Lady Qinghua’s yield.
“Hm?”
Beneath the black bear’s empty husk of a pelt, a black lacquered wooden box had been tucked within.
Shen Yi swallowed down the demon blood, swept the box up with a wave, and opened it to find a neat row of envelopes arranged inside.
He broke them open one by one and looked through them.
All the letters came from the same faction.
Their contents were equally uniform — almost entirely explanations and guidance on cultivation techniques.
The signature belonged to a faction he was already reasonably familiar with.
Qingqiu.
And within the letters, they referred to the Red-Eyed Demon King as their retainer.
Once he’d removed all the letters, what lay beneath them was a thick, bound volume of techniques.
“…”
Shen Yi opened it and swept quickly through the contents.
Shortly after, a new line appeared on his panel.
【Martial Immortal · Ten Thousand Forms Divine Cultivation Method: Not Yet Begun】
He thought back to the radiant armor and weapon the black bear had manifested earlier — taking intangible accumulated faith and condensing it into something visible to the eye.
No wonder a demon had suddenly decided to reinvent itself as some kind of divine lord.
It had found a teacher.
“Keep it for now.”
Shen Yi waved the panel closed. He’d come away with a handsome sum of demon lifespan — but the situation in Song Prefecture was hardly the norm. If every other province looked like this, Great Qian would have fallen long since.
Spend what needed spending, save what needed saving.
This kind of divine-spirit technique was at best an option of last resort, and besides, with Lady Qinghua’s current abilities she had no capacity left to control a more powerful divine spirit.
If only he could stumble upon a Spirit-Transformation-realm demon emperor to pick up cheap…
Shen Yi let his gaze drift to the Demon Origin on his panel — or should he feed her another one of those?
Better to wait.
Ten-thousand-plus years of demon lifespan was too valuable to spend on Qinghua without a pressing reason.
Best go back to the War Temple first and see if there was anything there more worth cultivating.
As for the Red-Eyed Demon King’s connection to Qingqiu — Shen Yi didn’t much care. Qingqiu had been on his mental list for a long time already. This was just one more entry to add to the tally.
“Counting everything prior — a hundred and twenty-six drops of demon blood. Should be enough to work with.”
He stowed the wooden box away, and made sure to keep the demon cores too — these could stand in for demon blood as supplementary medicine at this point, and waste was not an option.
He sat cross-legged, and began pouring demon lifespan into the Nine Demons Transmutation Method.
The immortal-demon spirit being fed this time was the second one.
【Year 1 — You fold demon blood into your four limbs and the whole of your body, offering it to the mountain lord. It begins instinctively consuming】
The same changes that had appeared before now began surfacing in the mountain lord.
Shen Yi pulled his robe open and looked at the fierce tiger pattern quietly rising across his skin — the demon blood flowing into its body was dyeing it a slightly uncanny shade of vivid red.
At the same time, an immense surge of force began erupting outward through his body.
The demon blood tally fell rapidly.
Over seventy drops gone in short order, and the mountain lord was still absorbing.
【Year 4,200 — The mountain lord’s rate of absorption begins to slow; its presence has climbed to what seems like a peak, making the immortal flood dragon beside it sense a challenge to its standing. The vivid, blazing tiger looks over at it with indifferent eyes, then swallows one more drop of demon blood】
(End of Chapter 227)