Aspiring to the Immortal Path

When the youth woke up, it was already night.

He immediately sat up and inspected his clothes, and when he found that nothing was wrong, he sighed in relief.

And then he remembered something and turned his head, whereupon he saw the blue-robed man who had saved him sitting next to a fire, roasting something.

The youth rushed over and grabbed the man’s hand. “We have to leave!”

He failed to move the man.

The youth frantically said, “We have to get out of here! Don’t get cocky just because you killed that scorpion fiend. It was far from the strongest here. There’s the rest of the 12 Fiend Kings, like the Heartbreaker Fiend King, the Blooddrinker Fiend King, the Violet Radish Fiend King, the Blackeye Fiend King, and the Herculean Fiend King. We have to leave, or else…”

“Are you talking about them?”

The man pointed nearby.

The youth froze, and only then did he notice that not far from the man was a pile of fiend corpses, which were clearly those of the twelve terrifying Fiend Kings of this area.

These nightmares for the survivors now quietly lay there, presenting no threat at all.

The youth also now saw that the man was holding the thick hindleg of the Herculean Fiend King and roasting it over the fire.

“You… you killed them all?” the youth asked in stupefaction.

He was still somewhat unwilling to believe his eyes.

The man gazed at him and faintly smiled, after which he offered the leg. “It’s done cooking, so eat.”

The youth received the leg and took a bite from it.

The meat was fragrant and delicious, but more importantly, when he bit in, a warm current of energy flowed through his meridians, making him grow stronger. After all, this was the flesh of a Fiend King, packed with energy.

The youth then thought of something and looked over himself, asking, “Was it you who saved me?”

Realizing how stupid this question was, he hastily got on his knees. “This lowly one pays respects to his savior.”

“Rise,” Tang Jie calmly said. “I thought that the humans of the Divine Spring Domain were all dead. I didn’t know that there were survivors, and from the look of it, more than just one.”

The youth stared at Tang Jie, seeming to pick up something else from his words.

Before he could say anything, Tang Jie said, “My name is Tang Jie. What’s yours?”

“Huangfu Meng,” the youth instinctively replied, and then he seemed to think of something and blushed, stammering, “I…”

Tang Jie casually replied, “Your sex is meaningless to me. I was just passing through. If you have any information regarding the fiends to offer to me, I can give you all those fiend corpses.”

Huangfu Meng was taken aback, and then he realized that since this man could so easily kill all those savage Fiend Kings, he had to be much stronger and could naturally see through any kind of illusion. As the spell art was undone, the scrawny youth gradually turned into a young girl, still so scrawny that it seemed like a light gust would make her fall apart, and still possessing a bright pair of eyes.

Huangfu Meng bowed to Tang Jie. “What does my savior wish to know?”

“Whatever is fine, so long as I don’t know about it,” Tang Jie casually replied. While Yiyi had spent many years in the Divine Spring Domain, she had been alone, so it was impossible for her to gather information on the entirety of the domain. Moreover, a human perspective of the Divine Spring Domain would differ greatly from a fiend’s perspective.

Huangfu Meng told Tang Jie what had happened to the humans of the Divine Spring Domain.

In truth, Yiyi had been basically right that the humans were all dead. After a long war in which the fiends had emerged victorious, humanity began to trend toward extinction. The surviving humans of the Divine Spring Domain were few in number, and they had all moved underground. There were basically no humans living on the surface at this point.

But the environment underground was difficult and had its own dangerous fiends. Humans had to be extremely careful, and besides, the fiends had not given up on their offensive underground.

Humans had been moving underground for around eight thousand years, and in these eight thousand years, humans had established more than a thousand cities of large and medium size underground, but they had all been destroyed by fiends.

Each time, the fiends would announce that the humans had been exterminated.

But each time, the humans would survive and reproduce like weeds in the wilderness.

“Humans are like rabbits. You can never kill them all!” These were the words said by a Fiend Titan once. Perhaps it was for this reason that the fiends were so brazen with their human hunting. They didn’t need to think about the future or attempt to raise them like livestock. They just needed to hunt them down and then eat them!

In such circumstances, every surviving human developed a formidable ability to escape and hide.

Huangfu Meng was just a young girl who had yet to reach Mortal Shedding, but she was agile and nimble, and she also possessed stealth and illusion abilities far surpassing her peers of the same level. At least Tang Jie felt that he had been her inferior in stealth and ambushes when he had been at her level. And according to Huangfu Meng, every surviving human of the Divine Spring Domain was like this.

Those that couldn’t do this were already dead.

This world’s humans had pushed stealth and evasion spell arts to the limit!

Even so, the scarcity of resources underground meant that humans suffered from hunger and starvation, so every year, some humans risked going to the surface to find food or else become the food of fiends.

Huangfu Meng was one such human. Her craving for the abundant resources on the surface meant that she forgot the rules on hunting on the surface and lingered. As a result, she got the attention of the area’s Fiend Kings and almost died for it.

“You’re saying that you lived on the surface for three months?” Tang Jie asked.

The girl forcefully nodded.

“Then you should have obtained enough food, right? Why didn’t you go back?”

Huangfu Meng clenched her teeth before saying, “So that more people could survive. My tribe is in great danger. We… Savior, we beg you to save us!”

She once more prostrated before Tang Jie, explaining the situation underground.

Huangfu Meng hadn’t come to the surface purely because of the lack of resources. In fact, her tribe was experiencing a major crisis.

Huangfu Meng lived in a human village called Neverwinter, with a small population of around three hundred people. They lived in an extremely secluded area of the underground, very difficult for fiends to discover. But their seclusion also meant a severe lack of resources. To survive, the humans there relied on a kind of moss called Shadow Moss to survive.

This moss required very little water to survive and could be eaten raw. It tasted awful, but at least it kept everyone alive.

But not long ago, the Shadow Moss began to die en masse. No matter what method everyone used, they couldn’t stop the Shadow Moss from dying, and the threat of starvation began to grow, striking fear into everyone’s hearts.

Huangfu Meng had decided to venture to the surface, and while she had obtained some food, she had sent it all back to the village and remained on the surface in order to gather even more food.

“In other words, a village of more than three hundred people is depending solely on you for its food?” Tang Jie asked.

“No, it’s not like that. There can’t be too many people on the surface at once, and also…” Huangfu Meng stammered out an explanation.

The more people there were, the higher the chance of being exposed, and the higher chance that the entire village would be destroyed. To be honest, Huangfu Meng had broken the rules. The people of her village had never given her permission to come up. She did not dare to say where she had gotten her food, instead converting it to jerky and secretly distributing it.

Of course, the people of the village weren’t just waiting around. They had attempted to gather food from elsewhere in the underground, but there was danger wherever they went, and ten-some villagers had already died.

While tragic, this fact drew no sympathetic action from Tang Jie.

As a Titan, he had a responsibility to the world, but he also needed to be sufficiently cold and callous. He couldn’t stop his journey for every minor matter. He was here to search for the secrets of the fiends of the Divine Spring Domain, to see what trump cards they had and if they could cause trouble for the Rosecloud Domain. If this village of a few hundred people delayed him from achieving his main objective, it might end up harming hundreds of millions of people.

So he needed to harden his heart and not act on emotion.

The girl’s weeping failed to move him, and just when Tang Jie believed that he could not gain any more worthwhile information from the girl and was preparing to leave, she said one more thing.

As Huangfu Meng wept, she said, “It’s all my fault. If I didn’t dig up that blue water, the Shadow Moss wouldn’t have died.”

“‘Blue water’? What kind of blue water?” Tang Jie was surprised.

“A deep blue water, welling up from deep underground. It’s extremely light and very cold…” Huangfu Meng described the water in very simple terms.

Despite her very imprecise description, Tang Jie was able to develop an image of this water in his mind. He instantly recalled the names of various exotic types of water and found a match: Skyspring Water.

Skyspring Water was an extremely light water, able to float upward in the air, and it was also blue.

This water had many uses. It could be used for special formations, and it could also be used to make medicines and talismans that could enhance flight-related spell arts and Divine Connections, or purify the body and strengthen the bones. But the latter use required large amounts of this water, and it was of little use to someone of Tang Jie’s level.

The lightweight blue water Huangfu Meng spoke of was very similar to Skyspring Water. The only difference was that Skyspring Water wasn’t cold.

So Tang Jie wasn’t totally sure of his conclusion.

Regardless, this strange water had drawn Tang Jie’s interest.

He muttered, “A surprise discovery.”

He turned to Huangfu Meng. “Take me to this spring, and these fiend corpses are all yours.”