Boom—!
A black-red aura of blood fiends, violent beyond measure, transformed into an immensely thick pillar of blood-colored light and forcibly tore through the domed ceiling of the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion's first-floor hall in an instant. The floor tiles exploded inch by inch. Countless counters and magical artifacts carved from precious white jade were obliterated like paper props beneath the impact of this terrifying fiendish aura—even a Foundation Establishment powerhouse would have paled before it.
“Ahh—! My hand! My face!”
A shriek so anguished it seemed to warp rang through the entire building.
The three Gu Yue Hai's trusted disciples at the very front did not even have time to raise their spiritual power barriers before their entire bodies were swallowed head-on by the blood-fiend aura, viscous as magma. Amid sizzling corrosion, their flesh melted away in the blink of an eye, leaving three ghastly skeletons. A moment later, even the bones exploded into dust that filled the air!
“Damn it! This isn't an Ice-Soul Blood Ginseng! This is the Black Witch Cult's ‘Bone-Eating Heart-Shattering Fiendish Aura’!”
Gu Yue Qiang was violently blown away by the shock wave and slammed into a marble pillar, vomiting blood.
Fortunately, he wore a high-grade defensive robe bestowed on him by Gu Yue Hai before their departure. A dense layer of silver spiritual radiance tightly shielded his heart meridians. Even so, the black-red fiendish aura still wormed its way inside through the cracks in his robe like a snake, making him howl in agony.
“Steward Xu! How dare you scheme against the Gu Yue clan?!” Gu Yue Qiang roared toward the circular platform, clutching his chest with a savage expression.
Yet Steward Xu and the red-robed female cultivator atop the platform were equally dumbfounded, their eyes filled with horror and disbelief.
“This... How is this possible?!”
Steward Xu was so furious he nearly crushed his steel teeth. According to the specially prepared poison supplied by the Black Witch Cult elder, the Bone-Eating Heart-Shattering Fiendish Aura should not have erupted until half an hour later, after Gu Yue Qiang and his people had reached the wilderness outside the city. By then, Fang Cunsheng, the servant carrying the box, would certainly have been destroyed in body and soul, and they could have escaped without a trace.
But why had the restriction detonated without warning inside the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion less than ten breaths after Fang Cunsheng took possession of it?!
“Black Witch Cult scum! You dare set up a killing scheme in the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion, and you even dare involve me in it? You're courting death!”
At that moment, a furious shout that seemed capable of shattering the soul suddenly exploded from the corner of the hall.
An old rogue cultivator at the Foundation Establishment stage, who had originally been sitting at the edge watching the show, had been caught by the threads of cause and effect Fang Cunsheng had laid down earlier. The instant the violent blood-fiend aura exploded, more than half of it abruptly turned as if it had grown eyes and slammed straight toward his face.
The old Foundation Establishment monster was so furious he laughed. He had been sitting there perfectly peacefully, and disaster had fallen from the heavens!
He shot to his feet. The terrifying pressure of late-stage Foundation Establishment erupted like a volcano. A black, skull-shaped saber radiating overwhelming demonic energy appeared in his hand out of thin air, and he viciously hacked it down at Steward Xu on the circular platform!
“Brother Wang, it's a misunderstanding! This is a misunderstanding!” Steward Xu was scared out of his wits.
But how could the old Foundation Establishment monster be willing to listen? A black saber beam more than a dozen yards long tore through the void amid the wails of ghosts and wolves, instantly cleaving the red-robed female cultivator in two. The enormous disturbance immediately activated the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion's defensive formation as well. Countless golden streams of light swept madly through the pavilion, plunging the scene into utter chaos.
Amid the blood rain spraying through the air, the screams, and the blinding radiance of the formation,
Fang Cunsheng, who should have been the first to turn into blood at the center of the explosion, was standing quietly in a patch of shadow at the very edge of the hall.
At his feet, the fragments left behind by the shattered white jade box still gave off a faint residual warmth. Yet within three feet of his body, an extremely concealed, perfectly pure circle of purple-gold Buddhist radiance had transformed into the phantom of an inverted ancient bell, firmly blocking all the blood-fiend aura and formation light outside.
The Purple-Gold Causal Buddha Bone was immune to all poisons, and all evil retreated before it!
“Gu Yue Qiang, you're pretty hard to kill.”
Through the blood mist filling the air, Fang Cunsheng coldly watched Gu Yue Qiang nearby, frantically swallowing pills and trying to crawl toward the main entrance.
In Fang Cunsheng's Eye of Cause and Effect, the black calamity threads above Gu Yue Qiang's head had already fully condensed into a “black dragon” representing certain death. Even with his defensive robe protecting him, there was no way he would survive today.
“I'll see you off for the last time.”
Fang Cunsheng's gaze turned utterly cold. His right hand remained hidden inside his wide sleeve, his index and middle fingers pressed together. The Purple-Gold Buddha Bone within him rumbled furiously as a thread of exquisitely pure karmic spiritual power, carrying the destructive true intent of the Ancient Buddha Blade, quietly gathered at his fingertips.
Whoosh—
A faint purple-gold finger force, nearly invisible, crossed several dozen yards of empty space in an instant. Hidden beneath the chaotic collisions of spiritual power filling the air, it struck with perfect precision at the crack in the defensive robe on Gu Yue Qiang's back!
Bang!
The silver robe, already on the verge of collapse, was completely shattered by this fatal final blow.
“Ah—no! Save me! Uncle Hai, save me!”
Deprived of the robe's protection, the omnipresent Bone-Eating Heart-Shattering Fiendish Aura surged into Gu Yue Qiang's body like a flood. His scream lasted barely half a breath before his entire body rapidly melted within the black-red poisonous flames, finally becoming a pool of foul-smelling black blood.
The prodigy from a distant branch whom Gu Yue Hai had painstakingly cultivated, his strongest spy left in the convoy to monitor Fang Cunsheng, had been utterly destroyed in body and soul!
The other Gu Yue clan disciples traveling with him had already been casually wiped out amid the chaos by the enraged Foundation Establishment rogue cultivator.
Apart from Fang Cunsheng, the Gu Yue clan's Jinling procurement convoy had once again been completely annihilated!
“It’s time to wrap things up.”
Fang Cunsheng looked around. The old Foundation Establishment monster was already locked in a furious battle with the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion's hidden experts in the center of the hall, and the entire seven-story building showed faint signs of collapse.
Without the slightest hesitation, his figure transformed into an erratic wisp of blue smoke. Following the sole “blue path of survival” that the Eye of Cause and Effect had long since charted for him—a route untouched by both the formation and the fiendish aura—he silently leaped out through a shattered side window of the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion and vanished completely into Jinling City's chaotic night.
Half an hour later, the disturbance at the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion finally alarmed Jinling City's enforcement guards.
Several peak Foundation Establishment cultivators and even a Core Formation elder of the Gu Yue clan stationed in the city forcibly ended their seclusion and led people to seal off the entire ruin. When they dug out Gu Yue Qiang's half-melted saber from the wreckage, along with the remnants of the Black Witch Cult's distinctive blood-fiend aura, the Gu Yue clan's Core Formation elder's face turned so dark it looked murderous.
“Black Witch Cult! How dare you kill a disciple of my Gu Yue clan's inner estate and steal our wedding supplies! Pass on my edict: search the entire city for the Black Witch Cult's fiends. Anyone found is to be killed without exception!”
Jinling City's night was completely roused. Countless cultivators were jolted awake, while the enforcement guards' flying swords wove a massive net across the sky.
Yet no one noticed that, in a run-down rogue cultivator inn several streets away from the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion,
Fang Cunsheng had already changed out of his bloodstained blue shirt and put on an utterly ordinary gray robe worn by rogue cultivators. He sat cross-legged on a stone bed. His face was somewhat pale, but his eyes shone with frightening brightness.
In front of him lay two storage bags, freshly drawn through the karmic aura from Gu Yue Qiang and several other disciples from afar.
“What a haul.”
Fang Cunsheng reached out and erased the spiritual imprints on them. When his divine sense swept inside, a satisfied smile immediately appeared at the corner of his mouth.
As the person responsible for this procurement, Gu Yue Qiang's storage bag contained the full thirty thousand low-grade spirit stones in public funds allocated by Chief Steward Xu! In addition, there were more than a dozen mid-grade spirit stones, as well as Gu Yue Qiang's entire personal fortune—several high-grade flying swords and several scrolls containing precious formation insights from the inner estate.
Adding in the rewards he had freeloaded from the Blackwind Mountains earlier, Fang Cunsheng's current wealth had already surpassed that of the vast majority of ordinary inner-estate disciples, even approaching that of some poorly established Foundation Establishment rogue cultivators!
With this fortune, there would be no further obstacle to obtaining the resources he needed to break through to Foundation Establishment.
“Brother Cunsheng... No, Senior Brother Fang, something huge happened at the Heavenly Treasure Pavilion. The entire city is hunting Black Witch Cult members. What should we do now?”
The secret chamber door opened. A-Xing, who had returned after gathering information, was deathly pale. He hurried inside, slammed the door shut, and spoke in a trembling voice.
Fang Cunsheng swept all the spirit stones away, then stood and looked out at Jinling City's night sky, which was as bright as day beneath the glow of countless flying swords. He let out a cold laugh.
“What does hunting the Black Witch Cult have to do with us? We're merely ‘victims’ who were attacked by evil cultivators, happened to survive, and were scared half to death.”
“First thing tomorrow morning, we'll go to Jinling City's ‘City God Temple.’ I want to see just how spectacular Gu Yue Hai's old face will look when he learns that Gu Yue Qiang is dead too.”
At that moment, the Purple-Gold Buddha Bone within him radiated a faint sense of longing.
Fang Cunsheng knew that he had thoroughly muddied the waters of Jinling City. The next great act would return to the Gu Yue clan's innermost estate, where it would fully take the stage on the wedding day of that prodigy, Gu Yue Wuxia!