Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know

End of the Great War

The Spirit Severing Array used power that went against the natural order to forcibly change spiritual veins, and was an extremely difficult array to set up. It required 108 flags and 108 Nascent Soul and above cultivators. Nascent Soul was already an impressive level among cultivators, and any sect who could deploy more than fifty at once would automatically rank number one among the cultivation world.

108 Nascent Soul disciples required the collective power of all the righteous sects to gather, and if they were missing even one person, the array would shatter, and all their efforts would be for naught.

The sects had been highly selective in choosing the disciples in the array, afraid one of them might have dealings with a demonic sect or their will wouldn't be firm enough and they would be influenced by inner turmoil. All 108 disciples they chose were future cornerstones of the righteous sects. Only when they were sure the array wouldn't be broken did they feel free to attack the demonic sects.

They never thought that Shu Yanyan had planted a time bomb in the righteous sects eleven years ago, and now, eleven years later, it disrupted the Spirit Severing Array and shook up the righteous sects' entire plan.

In midair, the white-robed woman held a righteous cultivator's Nascent Soul in one hand, and stuffed it casually inside her magic weapon, an unopened spider lily.

Shu Yanyan's bonded weapon was a near-demonic artifact as avaricious and bold as she was. It demanded to be fed a Nascent Soul every time it was used.

After devouring Hè Wenzhao's Nascent Soul, the spider lily slowly opened, and amidst Qiu Congxue's ghosts, flowers bloomed into a blood-red path, like the one that led lost souls to the afterlife.

The remaining 107 disciples watched these two beautiful yet wicked women with despair, and gradually lost consciousness among the fragrance of the spider lilies.

"Shu Yanyan!" Qiu Congxue yelled. "Your flowers devoured several of my ghosts!"

"You know my lilies," Shu Yanyan said unconcernedly. "Even I can't control them. They'll eat whoever they want. Are you capable of controlling your ghosts? Every time I get near you, I can hear the sound of those ghosts gnawing on bones—doesn't that hurt? No wonder you can never beat the Venerable even at Mahayana stage. You can't even control your own weapons, that's so pathetic."

The two women continued taunting each other while mopping up the enemy forces. Qiu Congxue grumbled. "The Venerable won't even let me eat any of their souls. I can't take it."

She ground her ghastly white teeth.

"The Venerable said that dead cultivators can reincarnate into ordinary people in their next life, so unless there's a deep grudge, there's no need to destroy someone's soul," said Shu Yanyan. "Us killing cultivators is those who defy heaven killing others who defy heaven, so cosmic law won't assign us any crime. But destroying a soul is messing with the system of the six paths of reincarnation. It'll be punished by the heavens, and our tribulations would be harder to pass."

"He's a demonic cultivator who'll kill people without a thought, but he has hangups about weird things," Qiu Congxue said disapprovingly. "After I first stepped down the Asura Path, I never thought of turning back."

Shu Yanyan shrugged. "You can disapprove of the Venerable all you want, but you gotta be able to beat him first. In Xuanyuan Sect, might has always made right."

Alongside the blossoming of Shu Yanyan's spider lilies, Dubhe was slowly colored red in the sky, shining down with bloody light.

"Indeed," the Jiuxing Sect Master said. "These three stars, Polis, Alkaid, and Dubhe, are our greatest obstacles in this war."