Chapter 97: Intelligence Briefing, Partial Truth

With his comprehension, it took him no more than half an hour to fully grasp the earth-piercing spell. His talent was monstrous.

This was only natural. By the time he cultivated the Yellow Court Scripture in the Nurturing Qi realm, his aptitude had already been strengthened to an excellent level, eighty points. By the Spirit Refining realm, it had surpassed the perfect score of one hundred. Then, after further cultivation in the Dao Body realm, the effects of the Yellow Court Scripture became even more terrifying, doubling down on both understanding and aptitude. Not to mention within Great Yue itself; even when the scope was widened to the Hundred Kingdoms Domain or the Desolate Domain, there were only a handful who could compare to him.

If it kept strengthening like this, he even felt that one day he might suddenly achieve enlightenment and ascend in broad daylight.

After breaking through to the Purple Mansion realm, Cao Chengyu finally opened the treasure chests he had been hoarding for a long time.

As expected, it was indeed the Yellow Court Scripture for the Purple Mansion realm.

Cultivation in the Purple Mansion realm also had three stages.

When the mana within the body was refined into a lake and the sea of consciousness formed the foundation of the soul, that was the early Purple Mansion stage.

Cao Chengyu's five-element mana was already five times that of an ordinary cultivator, and thanks to the Heavenly Demon Pill, his soul far surpassed that of the average person as well. The instant he broke through, he was already at the peak of a normal early Purple Mansion cultivator.

Yet his cultivation level had only just reached about one percent of Purple Mansion, which meant his potential was even greater; both his mana and his soul still had immense room to grow.

Unlike others, whose limits were reached once they attained his present level.

It was like this: if you score ninety points, that is all the talent you possess. If someone else scores one hundred, it is because the maximum is one hundred, and there is still room to rise.

That portion of potential was boundless.

After comprehending the earth-piercing spell, Cao Chengyu activated it. A pale yellow glow enveloped his body, and he sank into the ground at a glacial pace.

The slow speed was one of the spell's flaws.

The underground chamber lay only five or six meters beneath the surface, yet Cao Chengyu still had to expend considerable effort to pass through it safely.

High consumption was another flaw.

With a wave of his hand, he released two balls of flame, illuminating the underground space completely.

It was not large.

Aside from a small mountain of incense urns used to house spirits, there was only a rather blackened coffin resting at the far end.

Cao Chengyu drew one incense urn over and used his mana to peel away the ghost-sealing talisman that had sealed the mouth of the urn.

At once, a mass of dark mist drifted out.

Out of it crawled a wraith, mindless and acting only on instinct, its chest swollen with resentment.

A thoroughly vicious and malevolent ghost.

Its ghostly claws lunged for Cao Chengyu at once, but he flicked his sleeve and scattered it into dust.

Such evil spirits, formed from the resentment of mortals, were at most comparable to the Spirit Refining realm and posed no threat to him whatsoever.

Even if there were a hundred of them, they would only cost him a little extra effort to deal with.

What he could not understand was why the one who had laid this out would leave such things behind.

Unable to make sense of it, his gaze naturally fell upon the blackened coffin.

There were traces of lightning strikes on its surface.

"Could it have been struck by heavenly retribution?"

Cao Chengyu muttered the thought casually, then opened the coffin at once.

Though the coffin was blackened, the interior was surprisingly intact, and even a faint sandalwood fragrance lingered within.

A coffin, of course, should contain a corpse.

Inside lay a female corpse covered all over in blood-red sigils, naked as the day she was born.

Her body was extraordinarily well endowed.

One pale hand was draped, as if by chance, across the most private place.

A line suddenly surfaced in Cao Chengyu's mind: a maiden fears the sun, so she covers her shadow.

There was no sun in the underground chamber, of course. He shook his head hard, casting aside those filthy, obscene thoughts.

He silently cursed himself for being so hopeless.

Then he studied the strange blood sigils carefully.

The pattern was very similar to the core reversal runes of the Yin-Yang Reversal Formation, except that because it had been inscribed in a different place, it had been modified extensively.

He still remembered that when he had investigated this matter back then, the result had been that the entire Great Yue was covered by Yin-Yang Reversal Formations of all sizes.

The smaller formations in each region were themselves part of the grand formation spanning the whole of Great Yue, with varying degrees of importance, forming an array within an array.

That was why divining for anyone always yielded a great omen of disaster.

Because the entire nation of Great Yue was enveloped by the formation.

Once it was activated, the living would have their yang energy and life force drawn out and poured beneath the living stakes at the eyes of the formation across the land, serving to revive the dead.

And beneath every living stake was nailed a corpse that was neither alive nor dead, acting as an energy converter.

As for those barren villages, because of their locations they too had been arranged into the formation.

This branch absorbed yin energy, twisted yin and yang, and forcibly transformed it into yang energy and life force, serving the same purpose as the other side.

Living corpses were special beings born with both yin and yang properties; as a relay station for stripping away part of the impurities, they were the most suitable vessel of all.

Using all the living beings of Great Yue as the price, the amount of yang energy and life force drawn out was nothing short of enormous. At that scale, even if the revived people carried some defects, they could still preserve the traits of the living for a very long time. Perhaps the Emperor of Great Yue even had a way to reverse life and death completely, accomplishing what no one in history had ever achieved: bringing the dead back to life.

However, judged purely by the size of the formation, there were many more yang formations than yin ones.

If a vast number of living beings were wiped out in a short time, it would easily create a place of utter yin that would remain for a thousand years.

Those yin formations that extracted yin energy and transformed it into yang energy simply could not keep up.

Combined with the intelligence he had obtained from Lin Yunjiao regarding the Thousand-Eyed Demon Centipede, one could infer that the Thousand-Eyed Demon Centipede's objective was to use a place of utter yin and the national fortune that had endured for a thousand years to seize the fortune-golden dragon of Great Yue.

It sought to transform itself into a special fortune spirit without flesh.

The system of shared governance between immortals and mortals implemented by Great Yue was a reform made to strengthen Great Yue's destiny, and it served this creature in its entirety.

By doing so, it had essentially bound itself completely to Great Yue, becoming less a separate entity from the emperor and more one and the same.

Throughout all this, what did the Emperor of Great Yue stand to gain? Why was the plan called Transcendence?

Even if his ambition was no longer to rule the living, but instead to rule over ghosts and other such beings, he should not have been willing to place above his head another intelligent spirit of fortune.

As the flood of intelligence merged and connected, Cao Chengyu deduced even more truth from it. Only the Emperor of Great Yue's objective, and the inaction of the Five Elements Sect, remained suspicious.

Objective...

Cao Chengyu let out a long sigh.

Some of his questions had been answered, but even deeper ones had emerged in their place. He could feel that if he could confront Chi Jiuxiao face to face, the truth would surely rise to the surface.

The secrets of this little fishing village were simple enough as well.

It was probably an experimental site.

The blood sigils of "resurrection" carved into the female corpse were most likely an experiment prepared in advance by Emperor Chi Jiuxiao. He needed to ensure that his plan would be foolproof, so of course he had to test it beforehand.

Judging by the result, it had likely failed.

That group of evil spirits probably still had a function he did not know about.

Leaving the corpse here, aside from making it impossible to reuse repeatedly, may also have served to mislead the Thousand-Eyed Demon Centipede.

Showing the experimental result to one's partner, concealing one's true purpose while deepening mutual trust at the same time—why would he not do it?

Unfortunately, it had all been discovered by him, this little mouse.

After piecing together the intelligence from every direction, Cao Chengyu uncovered an even deeper secret.

The Thousand-Eyed Demon Centipede had come from the eastern border, and perhaps it still carried the arrogance of city folk looking down on country bumpkins. Even if it had been plotted against, it likely remained smug and completely unaware of it.