Volume 3, Chapter 58 – Blood Offering

After flying off, Bai Xiang did not head for the banks of the Jing River as the two had imagined. Instead, she found another emptied-out village and hid herself away in a thatched hut.

While there, she drew in her aura and swallowed a handful of pills and tablets, relying on her cultivation to refill her depleted qi-force.

The villagers’ method was indeed useful—but the consumption it required was no joke.

It hadn’t drained her stockpile dry, and she still had enough strength to suppress Han and Kong. But next she would be treating the ancient demon Shi Ling as a hypothetical enemy, and Bai Xiang would not allow herself to go searching in this state.

Flying in sword flight also consumed qi-force, and that expenditure was hard to fully make up again. Even if she did find the enemy like this, so what?

She couldn’t just assume Dr. Evan hadn’t had time yet to resurrect the ancient demon. There was no point in rushing blindly.

So, after some proper thought, she chose to find a place to lie low and recover her qi-force, then set out again once her condition had mostly stabilized.

That wouldn’t take long.

Bai Xiang’s body contained a world of its own. The rules that governed all things had to be recalculated once they entered her. She could even use her soul’s anomalous powers to forcibly reshape the contours of her body—burning through pill power in an instant was, naturally, child’s play.

In no time, the medicinal power was refined and extracted, sent straight into the center of her inner body-scape. There, driven and apportioned by the Core on the path of qi, it was transformed into surging streams of qi-yuan, pouring into every limb and bone.

Her deficit was filled. Warmth rose in her lower abdomen and between her brows. Bai Xiang opened her eyes, flashed out of the thatched hut, and once more set off on her hunt.

Chilong was nominally the southern region, but the four Circuits of Maozhou lay in the lower left of Chilong Circuit, further to the southwest.

Bai Xiang had departed from Zhen’nan, flying all the way northeast. Along the way she saw two more towns that had been emptied out, and in between, she saw refugee lines stretching along the road.

The refugees had mostly gathered from the surrounding villages and towns. Families brought their elders and children, drove cattle and sheep, piled chickens, ducks, and other poultry onto carts and pushed them along, struggling to hurry to the southeast.

One look at that direction and you could tell they planned to head to Chilong. Clearly they had no idea Chilong Circuit had already been strategically abandoned; going there now was as good as walking to their deaths.

Just then, a jumbled demon tide surged down from the north. The people on the ground cried out in alarm. A group of men in woven vine armor with rifles and long spears in their hands rushed up from the rear to meet it, about to collide with the demon tide.

Not a single cultivator among them—that kind of resistance really was just seeking death.

Bai Xiang dropped straight down. She swung her blood sword in a full arc and smashed it into the ground. A massive fan-shaped swath of demon beasts ahead was shaken into powder by that single blow, shattered bones and torn flesh spraying in all directions with their blood, only to be immediately fought over by the other beasts.

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This wave of the demon tide had most likely come from the main force at the Jing River. Whether in sheer size or viciousness, they were far worse than the ones Bai Xiang had run into before. There were even massive beasts like the Golden-Horned Rhino and Hook-Tusk Elephant that only existed on open plains.

Even so, they weren’t hard to deal with. Bai Xiang carved through them with her sword and wiped them out, then turned back to the villagers.

“…Thank you for your aid, Immortal!” A stout man stepped out from among them, quick to read the situation, and knelt to her. “My name is Dong Li. On behalf of everyone from Fangyuan Village and Zhuyi Village, I thank the Immortal!”

“Chilong Circuit is not a place you should go,” Bai Xiang said bluntly. “It’s already been abandoned by the garrison. Your only way out is to turn right and head for Zhen’nan Circuit. There is a solid defensive line built there.”

The men from the villages had originally been sneaking glances at her figure and face. The moment they heard this, they all started talking at once.

“What’s this Zhen’nan Circuit?”

“New territory? Isn’t Qi land only supposed to have four Circuits?”

These people really weren’t valued at all.

Bai Xiang could only shake her head.

She had thought the Circuit City would at most drain the surrounding area’s lifeblood. She hadn’t expected them to control even this sort of basic information, to the point that Maozhou had been under construction for months and yet most people in these remote villages still didn’t even know it existed.

It was hard to imagine something like that happening in a modern society with mobile phones and radio.

“This is the map.” Deciding to see the good deed through, she drew her sword and carved a rough outline of Maozhou into the ground, then marked their approximate current position.

“From here, to here.”

The sword tip traced a straight line.

“If you push hard on the road, there’s a chance you’ll be rescued before dark.”

She wasn’t lying—but it was obvious most of them were looking at her with doubt.

That wasn’t how they should have reacted. Bai Xiang immediately realized it had to be fallout from the Prince of the South’s rebellion.

People like those from the Demon-Immortal Dao, plus the rebel troops—before they attacked the Circuit City, they had probably already ravaged the surrounding villages, leaving the villagers with a strong aversion to unfamiliar cultivators and the feeling that anyone who showed up had bad intentions.

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But I shouldn’t count as an “unfamiliar cultivator,” should I.

Bai Xiang raised a brow. She’d thought her face and her exploits had already spread across the Nine Provinces.

Too lazy to tangle with fame and reputation, she called over the man in charge. “You’re Dong Li?”

Dong Li nodded rapidly. “Yes, yes! Immortal… you’re really beautiful!”

“And I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before!”

Bai Xiang’s chest rose and fell once. She asked, “You only have people from two villages here?”

Dong Li’s expression darkened. “There were supposed to be five. But everyone from Dingjia Village, Qingwu Village, and Tunxi Village is gone.”

“How did they go missing?” Bai Xiang pressed. “Did the people and livestock all vanish mysteriously, with bloodstains all over the roads?”

“Yes, yes!” Dong Li nodded hard. “It’s really strange! If it were demon beasts, there wouldn’t be so little noise… Not a single house knocked down—it doesn’t look like they were attacked at all!”

“Which direction are those three villages in?”

“Dingjia is to the west, and Qingwu and Tunxi are both to the east.”

Cunning.

Bai Xiang pursed her lips slightly.

She’d already thought it odd that, going by the pattern of her pursuit, there would be two villages with missing people… Obviously, Dr. Evan had been deliberately shifting locations, his goal to mislead any pursuers and buy as much time as possible to resurrect the ancient demon.

“If you want to live, follow the route I gave you,” she said, giving Dong Li another glance before her body lifted from the ground and shot off in flight.

Many of the villagers had been watching. They looked on with open envy, and a noisy group broke out into argument over whether they should change their route.

“I don’t agree!” someone shouted. “Why should we listen to one person’s word? The new territory can’t be fully built yet! Its defenses can’t be more solid than Chilong’s!”

“But she seems to be that genius swordswoman who made a name for herself in Chilong… She wouldn’t lie to us, would she?”

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“And it’s not like there aren’t lying cultivators,” someone else shot back. “The stronger they are, the better they lie!”

“Then why would she bother saving us?”

“Maybe she just wants to toy with people!”

In the end, everyone looked to Dong Li to decide.

“Brother Li, what do you think…?”

He’d always been the sharpest among the villages, after all.

“We go that way.” Dong Li pointed in a direction.

Faces changed at once—that was the southwest, the very direction Bai Xiang’s sword tip had traced.

“I noticed black specks in the sky earlier,” Dong Li said, taking a drag on his cigarette and blowing out a stream of smoke.

“She came from that direction. But there wasn’t a demon tide chasing behind her.”

“Which means she already cleared it out.”

“Heading that way is the safest!”

“But…”

“No buts!” Dong Li waved a big hand.

“Anyone who wants to go, follow me! Anyone who doesn’t, split off on your own!”

“Stop arguing! If we waste any more time, I’ll hack you myself!”

On the other side, Bai Xiang sped up as she followed Dr. Evan’s trail.

She found one village after another. A few had refugees trickling out; most had been reduced to blood slurry and pulp. She noticed that the farther she went, the thicker and larger the “centipede shells” left behind in these villages became. She guessed that Dr. Evan’s experiments were progressing, and he was drawing ever closer to resurrecting the ancient demon.

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Suddenly, she halted mid-flight. Her legs swung under her skirt as she braked in the air, squinting down at the scene below.

Below was a vast, desolate landscape, no village in sight. Yet the wasteland was covered in bloody mud and bone fragments, which had been used like crimson meat paste to outline the shape of a colossal demon on the plain.

Centipede-like, with countless clawed legs…

Bai Xiang stared at that bloody outline, thinking that this had to be what Shi Ling looked like.

Dropping lower, she saw a curly-haired man in an old jacket squatting beside the outline.

“Miss Bai.”

As he nudged the pieces of meat and clotted blood into just the positions he wanted, forming the rudimentary shape of the beast’s eyeballs, Bruce Evan let out a sigh and turned his head.

“Great Yu and the federations are no different at their core. You’re one of the oppressed under them too.”

“Why can’t we work together?”

Bai Xiang shook her head. “I won’t vent my resentment on others just because I’ve suffered.”

Dr. Evan raised his eyebrows. “So what?”

“If they don’t resist, they’re accomplices.”

“I don’t care.” Bai Xiang drew her sword with a ringing clang.

“If they provoke me, I kill. If they don’t, that’s another matter.”

Dr. Evan shouted at her, “You’re condoning evil!”

Bai Xiang smiled. “You’re in no position to judge.”