Way of the Devil

“And this Devil Essence… doesn’t even need refining and I can directly condense it into liquid and integrate it with my body.”

Lu Sheng looked around again and soon found more items with Mental Energy.

After killing seven or eight giant wolf creatures, Lu Sheng finally stumbled upon the first creature that was close to “intelligent” in this cavern.

It was a giant, murky green wolf, rotting all over and with all sort of arrows that stuck out from his body.

In the dark, the giant wolf’s glowing green eyes were examining Lu Sheng from head to toe.

“Another one… the ancient devils have been freed and broken through several layers of seals. Me and many other guardians have been contaminated… Did the Song Imperial Court send you?”

“You… can talk?” Lu Sheng was a little surprised.

“Why would I be unable to talk?” the wolf said nonchalantly in the ancient Great Song dialect. “You seem quite powerful, but you are still no match for the ancient devil. Why did you come alone?”

“Yes, it’s just me. I came here by accident,” Lu Sheng said honestly. “Just what is the Devil’s Abyss?”

“Where is your Divine Weapon Master? Outside?” the rotting wolf said after looking around the cave.

“Ummm… Not really…” Lu Sheng, of course, didn’t have a Divine Weapon. But the confident way the wolf said it made him decide to hide his situation for now.

“And you came down here? Are you trying to commit suicide?” The wolf gave Lu Sheng a weird look. At the same time, he slowly and quietly moved out of the dark, towards Lu Sheng.

“You must understand that an ancient devil is nothing like a typical devil king. It has a very special power to absorb things, as well as all the advantage of the ancient species…”

The great, rotting wolf approached Lu Sheng as he spoke.

Lu Sheng could finally make out the details of the wolf’s body from this distance: it had a body over four meters tall with giant black rusting arrows sticking out all over its body. Some pierced through its belly, some through its chest, and some even through its eyes.

It was a demon wolf that should’ve been dead, but it was still talking to Lu Sheng as if everything was fine.

“…The devil kings sealed in the lower levels have been sucked dry by them. The purpose of letting them in is to better suppress the power of the sealed devil kings, but now they themselves are the problem.” The rotting wolf continued to approach Lu Sheng, “Did you seriously come here by yourself?” he asked.

“What are you trying to say?” Lu Sheng frowned. His gaze landed on the dense cluster of arrows sticking out from its body.

“Nothing. I just thought you alone shouldn’t be enough to reinforce the seal. After all, back then it took all of us to—”

“Whoosh!”

Suddenly, a claw swept from the dark towards Lu Sheng’s back. The claw split into five parts and closed in on Lu Sheng from all angles.

“…Since you will die anyway if you go down, might as well provide some fresh food for me who has guarded this place for centuries!! Too long… I haven’t tasted live prey for too long…” The wolf roared and started to laugh with hatred and cruelty.

“Boom!!”

The claw landed on Lu Sheng’s back, but the wolf roared in pain. It retreated several steps, holding its right paw.

Its entire right paw was covered in bloody punctures, and vast amounts of dark and thick liquid were dripping from its wounds.”You… you…!!?”

The wolf stared at Lu Sheng with a frightened expression—this human which a second ago, looked normal now had clusters of spikes growing out of his back.

Its paw was punctured by these spikes that were as sharp as swords when it tried to attack Lu Sheng.

“Boring trick.” Lu Sheng cracked open a smite, showing his sharp teeth and slender tongue. “You did provide a lot of information…”

“Whoosh!”

Lu Sheng suddenly moved, a tail striking from his back like a viper. It coiled around the wolf’s neck and lifted it into the air.

“NO!!!!!!!” The absolute difference in power didn’t give the wolf any opportunity to struggle.

It struggled with all its might, clawing desperately at the tail. Its mouth occasionally sprayed out black mist or flashes of green light.

A little pair of flesh wings even sprouted out of its back, desperately trying to get out of the tail’s chokehold.

“I’ll leave your body intact.”

“Snap!!”

The giant rotting wolf’s neck snapped and its head dropped on the ground. Its entire body also suddenly turned into minced meat and sprayed onto the ground.

Lu Sheng didn’t even look at the body and just casually dropped the head on top of the pile of meat with his tail.

“There. Intact body.”

“Whoosh…”

A cloud of pitch-black Devil Qi sprayed out of the wolf’s body and abruptly flew away, disappearing deeper into the pitch black cavern.

Lu Sheng didn’t pay any attention to it, and instead started to search through the body of the wolf carefully and quickly found a string of keys.

The keys made a crisp sound. They somehow had not rusted, and looked like they had been taken care of well.

Lu Sheng hesitated, but still threw the key chain into his bag and started to circle around the cavern once again.

Soon, he found a narrow space separated by a plank in the corner.

The space wasn’t big, about as large as a normal house’s bedroom. Inside were several barrels, a dressing table, a bookshelf, and a candle stand.

Somehow, there were still books on the shelf.

Lu Sheng approached it and took out a book. It was written in incomprehensible symbols, neither Song nor Ancient Song.

He thought about it and put the book back, and instead looked at the wood carving on the barrel.

It was a little statue, carved with red and black stone.

“What is this…”

Lu Sheng held up the statue and noticed that there were candles in front of where the statue was placed. There also appeared to be a smooth dent on the ground right in front of his foot.

The resident here seemed to be worshiping an idol.

Before Lu Sheng got around to checking how sturdy the idol was, he was first shocked by the amount of mental energy in it.

“This much!!?” He was so shocked he nearly dropped the idol.

If the door covered in roots before was impactful, then this idol was the equivalent of winning the lottery.

He thought it was just an ordinary object, but in fact, it was a treasure!

‘Burning, Destruction, Longing, Nothingness, spread the message: let this pain redeem all lives, let this destruction ignite all sinful thoughts…” A faint voice, like it was reciting some scripture, entered Lu Sheng’s ear.

Even though he didn’t know what language the voice was in, he could still strangely understand all of the words.

“Mind-altering power field?” Lu Sheng ignored it and pointed his index finger at the face of the idol.

Soon, a drop of dense dark-red blood dripped onto the idol.

“Hiss…”

A vast amount of mental energy started flowing into Lu Sheng’s body. He hadn’t used his blood to absorb mental energy in a very long time. It wasn’t because he couldn’t, but rather because there weren’t many items with enough mental energy worth using this method.

Normally, for just a couple hundred points, a touch was enough. It was unnecessary to force out blood.

But this idol was different.

This blood-red idol, about as large as a palm and wearing a veil disguising its gender, stored more than 600 units of Mental Energy.

With this amount of Mental Energy, blood-dripping was the only way to absorb all of it in a timely fashion.

As a faint white smoke started to rise from the idol, the Mental Energy within soon all surged into Lu Sheng.

After its Mental Energy had been sucked dry, the idol glowed faintly before breaking into several pieces with a snap.

Lu Sheng ignored the pieces on the ground: they were useless without Mental Energy. Instead, he focused his attention on evolving his body even further.

The Ultimate Eight-Headed Devil Way had evolved his body to an incomprehensible level. After absorbing the Devil Essence from the altar, his body had long since been altered to match the state of a Divine Weapon. Also known as Origin Power.

But Lu Sheng didn’t know where exactly on the Origin Power level he was at. This level was quite foreign to him. Without something as a reference, he didn’t know if he had reached the level of Divine Weapons or not.

“Currently, I’m probably at the level of Holy Weapons, but I think I still can’t match a Divine Weapon yet.” Lu Sheng examined his body again after absorbing the Mental Energy.

His Prime Devil Qi had undergone a fundamental change and was now a special Devil Qi that glowed faint purple. Aside from an increase in size, nothing else changed.

He was in his Extreme Yin Form, but luckily, he was able to control his body and repress his height back to nearly two meters.

But some weird features on his body couldn’t be covered.

For example, the whole mouth of sharp teeth. Before, he could have covered it with muscles, but after a third row appeared, that didn’t work anymore.

In the dark, Lu Sheng walked towards the altar in the middle, where the entrance to the next level should’ve been.

The first choice to use the Mental Energy on was of course the Ultimate Eight-Headed Devil Way. But the amount of Devil Qi required for that was also immense…

“Luckily there is nothing here but Devil Qi. Great for improving all my Devil Body related secret arts!”

This was a rare opportunity. Without much thought, Lu Sheng summoned Shadow Devil to guard himself and started cultivating.

********************

The West Infinity Court.

The Thousand Phoenix Pavilion is West Infinity Court’s largest weapon warehouse and acted as a place to store weaponry reserves.

Noble families and sect disciples, of course, wouldn’t use normal weapons. Their weapons often included special materials, and some even included Divine Weapon shards, making them special weapons with divine markings.

The Devil Horde Calamity happened at the City of a Thousand Sails, but right now they were at the general headquarters of the West Infinity Court, quite a distance from that city

Hence, when the huge battle was going on, this place was still working on the various details of the Minor Sect Alliance.

Zhao Zhi, in his purple robe decorated with two dragons playing with a pearl and amber crown with a background of clouds and mountains, was casually talking to two other sect masters who just arrived.

Suddenly, a disciple urgently ran up to them and gave an encrypted letter to Zhao Zhi.

Zhao Zhi opened a corner of the letter and only glanced at it before folding it back and burning it to dust.

“You may leave,” he ordered.

The disciple retreated slowly.

“The city gate has been shut. The formation has been set up. With the Hundred Transformations and Thousand Chances Formation, even if we attack from both inside and out, we might not be able to break through. How generous of Brother Zhao—you even brought out such a sect treasure to protect everyone,” the sect master next to him complimented him with a smile.

“I’m only doing my job. As the host, the West Infinity Court will try its best to make everything perfect. Deploying the formation is only because of some recent intelligence on security issues. It’s only on for one day to make sure that no one can interrupt us.” Zhao Zhi’s eyes flashed with a cold light, but he still smiled at the same time.