Chapter 693: Taking Over the Martial Immortal Mountain Range

The Moon-Embracing Sect had sent six people on this expedition, and now four of them were already dead.

Only Zhou Wu and another female cultivator, similar in age to Nie Yu, remained alive.

Zhou Wu advanced step by step, slowly closing in on the female cultivator.

"Senior Brother Zhou..."

The female cultivator's voice was choked with tears.

She was the very disciple of the Moon-Embracing Sect who had mocked Chen Yan's accent at the very beginning.

"Senior Brother Zhou, please don't kill me, I'm begging you. I'll do anything you ask, I don't want to die..."

The young woman wept with pear blossoms drenched in rain, looking utterly pitiful.

Yet it did nothing to shake Zhou Wu's resolve to silence her. Everyone who had witnessed him kill Nie Yu today had to die.

The long sword in his hand hung point-down, scraping an ear-piercing sound across the ground.

"Senior Brother Zhou, don't kill me. What did I do wrong? Please don't kill me..."

The young woman continued to beg for mercy.

Zhou Wu remained silent, merely raising his long sword, twisting his wrist, and slashing toward the female cultivator before him.

Then, he suddenly felt a lightness in his hand.

Startled, Zhou Wu lowered his head and looked at the long sword in his grasp—

There was no long sword to be seen.

All that remained was the sword hilt still clutched in his hand.

A brief moment of stunned confusion, as if his thoughts had short-circuited, before Zhou Wu suddenly seemed to remember something and whipped his head around to look to the side.

There stood the mountain wild man in coarse cloth garments, quietly observing from the corner, his face completely devoid of any expression.

And in his hand, he was pinching a blade edge.

In the instant he had swung his sword just now?

How was that possible?

Zhou Wu's heart plummeted like a stone.

He now understood that the man standing in the shadows of the corner was no ordinary person, and certainly no wild man.

Someone capable of such a feat had to be at least a Qi Sea Realm cultivator.

And the people living in the settlements deep within the Martial Immortal Mountain Range, even if they fed on the flesh and blood of demonic beasts, could at best forge their bodies to match Qi Circulation Realm cultivators.

So who was this man, really?

And what was his purpose...

"May I ask, Your Excellency, who might you be?"

Having realized he stood absolutely no chance of defeating the middle-aged man in coarse cloth garments, Zhou Wu straightened his body and bowed respectfully.

"Does it matter?"

Chen Yan spoke indifferently:

"You don't need to know who I am. You only need to know that among all of you, I only need to leave one alive to carry the message out for me."

Hearing this, Zhou Wu immediately breathed a sigh of relief, then said with utmost deference:

"I would go through fire and water for you, Senior. It is my duty without hesitation!"

Chen Yan said nothing. The silence stretched through the withered forest for a long moment.

And the words he spoke next plunged Zhou Wu into an ice-cold abyss:

"Not you."

The moment the words left his mouth, like a kite with a snapped string, Zhou Wu's body toppled straight forward, becoming a corpse.

A Passable God Realm cultivator could, with a single thought, control the life and death of all cultivators below the Spirit Connection Realm within the range of their spiritual sense.

Let alone Chen Yan, who was now at the middle stage of the Immortal Ascension Realm.

The reason Chen Yan chose to kill Zhou Wu was simple.

Because he was too clever.

If the one who had survived were Nie Yu instead of Zhou Wu, Chen Yan would have killed Nie Yu without hesitation as well.

If one was clever enough, they might detect certain clues from the anomalies and inconsistencies.

He needed someone easier to manipulate.

Someone like that seemingly useless, crying young woman.

Chen Yan walked slowly toward the young woman.

The young female cultivator of the Moon-Embracing Sect looked at Chen Yan with eyes full of terror.

For some reason, what surfaced in her mind were the scenes from not long ago, when she had first seen the middle-aged man in coarse cloth garments and mocked his accent.

But now...

"Please don't kill me, Uncle Wild Man! Uncle Wild Man!"

The young female cultivator wailed loudly.

Truly foolish, but that was exactly what fit Chen Yan's requirements.

He slowly extended his right index finger and lightly pressed it against the young woman's forehead.

Emptiness Annihilation Art.

This technique capable of manipulating cause and effect rapidly searched through the threads of cause and effect tangled around the young woman, locating every strand connected to the Martial Immortal Mountain Range.

This young female cultivator of the Moon-Embracing Sect was merely a cultivator whose talent ceiling was at best the Martial Spring Realm.

In the eyes of Chen Yan, an Immortal Ascension Realm cultivator, she was no different from an ant.

Rewriting her memories by manipulating her cause and effect was, for Chen Yan, simplicity itself, and the karmic backlash it inflicted on him was completely negligible.

After rewriting everything, Chen Yan lightly snapped his fingers, and the young female cultivator of the Moon-Embracing Sect immediately fell unconscious.

Chen Yan slowly turned around and gazed at the withered forest behind him.

With a subtle stir of his divine thought, countless strands of spiritual energy began surging from all directions toward where he stood, condensing deep beneath his feet into countless veins of spirit stone mineral deposits.

At this moment, the scheme Chen Yan had conceived on a whim had been brought to complete fruition.

...

At the southwestern corner of the Martial Immortal Mountain Range, a massive spirit mine with reserves reaching the hundreds of billions had been discovered.

This news spread rapidly throughout the entire Western Region of the Martial Immortal Mountain Range.

According to reports, in the southwestern corner of the Martial Immortal Mountain Range, a small sect called the Moon-Embracing Sect had several reckless Qi Circulation Realm disciples and one Martial Spring Realm disciple who broke the restriction and rashly ventured into the mountain range, where they made the discovery by chance.

Of the six Lower Three Realms disciples, five had been devoured by the demonic beasts of the mountains, their very bones nowhere to be found.

Only a female cultivator of just fifteen or sixteen had managed to escape from the Martial Immortal Mountain Range by sheer luck, and she relayed the news of the suspected spirit mine discovery to the Moon-Embracing Sect.

With matters concerning the sect's Holy Son at stake, the Moon-Embracing Sect's Passable God Realm sect leader personally traveled to the Martial Immortal Mountain Range and, at the location indicated by the young woman, discovered the spirit mine.

A spirit mine capable of producing hundreds of billions of high-grade spirit stones.

A mine of this scale completely overwhelmed the Moon-Embracing Sect's leader, and he knew full well that the Moon-Embracing Sect could never hope to swallow a mine of this magnitude on its own.

Rather than trying to claim the mine for themselves, it was better to make the news public and let the major sects of Chenping Continent come divide up the hundred-billion spirit mine within the Martial Immortal Mountain Range.

By then, the immortal path of the Martial Immortal Mountain Range would surely flourish.

And then, leveraging his geographical advantage, he could try to catch a few scraps falling through the fingers of those major sects, which would still be immeasurably better than the Moon-Embracing Sect's current development and circumstances.

But what no one could have anticipated was that, not long after this hundred-billion-grade vein had just become known to the world, Pure Dust True Person Qiu Siruo of Du Cang Mountain actually arrived in person at the Martial Immortal Mountain Range.

And she declared that from this day forward, the Martial Immortal Mountain Range would be completely taken over by Du Cang Mountain.