Chapter 214 – Exploration Complete, Moving to the Holy Tree Temple - Part 1

Gongshan Jun was dead, and the demon hunters all fell silent.

Those at the ninth and eighth rank did not dare speak. The seventh rank hunters, however, understood that Gongshan Jun had chosen a fatal path. It might well have been what led him to his end. So what more was there to say?

The real question was how that person had known about Gongshan Jun’s plan.

And more importantly, what would they face now?

Fight?

That was out of the question.

Before the old monster who appeared as a mere youth had even shown up, he’d repelled them with a few pebbles in an instant, precisely controlling his power so as not to kill anyone. Among them were ninth, eighth, and seventh rank experts, each with different levels of strength. Yet in the blink of an eye, he had assessed every individual’s capability and dealt exactly the right amount of damage.

That feat alone was even more terrifying than beating them on the spot; it crushed their will to resist.

At that moment, Li Yuan looked at the fresh sixth rank corpse on the ground, then turned to Tang Nian. She stood there, biting her lip, staring at Gongshan Jun’s body. Her fingers, dangling by her trousers, trembled slightly.

Li Yuan gave his goddaughter a long look, then glanced over her shoulder at the other demon hunters. Finally, he raised his voice and said, “You lot, follow me back.”

None of the demon hunters dared protest. They hurried after Li Yuan, returning to the camp.

Tang Nian stayed behind.

She understood her godfather’s intention; he was letting her make her own decision.

Standing alone where the path entered the mountains, she looked at the corpse, then turned to the puppet Tang Qiu, and finally glanced after her godfather’s receding figure. Overhead, clouds drifted across a bright sky; it was a beautiful day.

The short-haired girl tried to smile, but it vanished as quickly as it appeared.

She made her choice.

Opening a trunk, she drew a blade, took out a small box meant for storing demonic beast hearts, and crouched by the fallen sixth rank martial artist. With skilled precision, she sliced through the excess flesh. Soon, her hands were stained with hot, fresh blood.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

A short while later, a hand lifted the flap of the tent.

Tang Nian walked in, followed by the towering puppet. Blood still dripped from her hands, and her face was pale.

Killing was one thing; harvesting a heart was another. She had once controlled the puppet to slaughter vicious bandits without hesitation, but cutting out a human heart herself demanded crossing a mental barrier.

“Pops...” Tang Nian spoke in a raspy voice. Then, looking up, she forced a bright smile. “I’m back. I’ve collected the heart. Now, can you get me some fresh sixth rank puppet materials?”

Li Yuan stood as if to take her hand, but, noticing that she looked about the same age as he did, he stopped. “Your hands are filthy, go wash them.”

“Filthy, huh...?” Tang Nian remarked, gazing down at her hands. Then she muttered to herself, in an almost inaudible whisper. “Yes, my hands are stained with blood now. The darkness of the world slowly swallows me whole... But I shall embrace it and become the night itself! Kukuku...!”

Li Yuan eyed her for a while with a raised eyebrow. “Be honest, have you been sneaking peeks at the books your little brother has been reading, like

Legend of Heroes

?”

Tang Nian froze and gave him an odd look. “How’d you figure that out?”

“How else would you come up with that sort of line?” Li Yuan sighed.

“...” Tang Nian fell silent, a slight blush spreading across her cheeks.

Li Yuan continued, “Did you search the body?”

“Huh?” Tang Nian asked, relieved to be changing the topic.

“In a place like this, most people carry everything on them,” Li Yuan said.

Nodding, Tang Nian replied, “There was nothing on him. But while I was dissecting, there was a faint floral scent under all the blood.”

“Floral scent?” Li Yuan frowned.

Tang Nian and Tang Qiu stood quietly behind him. Although it had only been a couple days since Tang Nian stepped off the carriage for this training expedition, she had learned a great deal, and her temperament had begun to shift.

Before long, a burly man entered and knelt respectfully beside Li Yuan. “Master.”

Apparently, the others referred to him as Wood Dog Quatro. Why such an odd name? Li Yuan had no idea. Among demon hunters lacking proper registration, names were often this arbitrary.

Wood Dog Quatro spoke in detail about everything that had happened. Gongshan Jun was the leader of this small band of demon hunters; Wood Dog Quatro was second in command.

They had a small camp and typically hunted only in a few familiar spots, never daring to head as far as the Sunset Rainforest. As for wives or family, none of them had any. When they craved pleasure, they would take their earnings to the nearby county, feast on good food, and hire women for a few days of revelry, returning only when they were spent.

Their cultivation technique came from a group called the Mountain Gang in the neighboring Autumnlake County, mostly because they themselves had broken off from that organization some time before. Li Yuan was well aware of the Mountain Gang; seven years ago, General Mammoth and Zhao Xiantong’s forces had annihilated it.

Wood Dog Quatro explained further. They had been members of the Mountain Gang, but Gongshan Jun was an outsider who later joined them. And it was Gongshan Jun who first proposed hunting demonic beasts for profit.

Now that Gongshan Jun was gone, Wood Dog Quatro would naturally take over. He planned to shift their hunting grounds a bit closer to the outskirts, but otherwise, little would change.

“Does that mean you won’t be able to catch seventh rank demonic beasts anymore?” Li Yuan asked.

Wood Dog Quatro bowed and replied, “We’ll manage just fine. Gongshan Jun’s absence won’t affect us much. We’ve all been relying on a special poison. We call it ghostly incense. He may have been the one who brought us the formula, but as long as we have the ingredients, we can make it ourselves.”

He handed Li Yuan a rolled piece of parchment. “Here’s the recipe.”

Li Yuan nodded, glanced at it briefly, then passed it to Tang Nian.

Ghostly incense was a type of blended fragrance containing shadow incense and fiery incense. Shadow incense was made from the bones of seventh rank demonic beasts, serving as a long-lasting cultivation aid when demonic beast meat was running low. Though nowhere near as potent as actual demonic beast flesh, it had a strong, meaty aroma that lured beasts in droves. Fiery incense was intensely pungent and not easily dispersed.

The core ingredient of ghostly incense, though, was a plant called the icebone flower, also nicknamed little ice stick. Outwardly a peculiar, cold, brittle white plant, it grew in the direction of the small village Gongshan Jun had mentioned.

“That village must be a ghost domain, right?” Li Yuan asked.

Wood Dog Quatro nodded. “Yes. Gongshan Jun told me it’s a ghost domain, but he claimed as long as we didn’t wander inside, we’d be safe. We gather Icebone Flowers on the outskirts, circulating our shadow blood technique to resist the Yin energy.”

Li Yuan shut his eyes for a moment, quickly grasping how Ghostly Incense worked. By mixing the Yin-rich icebone flower with those other fragrances, it interfered with a demonic beast’s shadow blood, weakening its limbs until it collapsed, just like an ordinary person inhaling knockout incense.

𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

“What sort of ghost domain are we talking about?” he asked next.

Wood Dog Quatro scratched his head. “Can’t say for sure. I never dared get too close, and only know what Gongshan Jun told me; it’s supposedly a small mountain estate.”

A mountain estate?

Li Yuan’s brow furrowed as his mind jumped to a place he had once seen. It was dilapidated and damp, like a giant corpse. A quaint stream wound through the grounds, but there was something black and eerie drifting in its water. He had gone there in the past with the tiger he’d tamed, Calico. And they had barely escaped with their lives. That memory alone still made his blood run cold.

He had Wood Dog Quatro sketch a rough map of the surrounding terrain. Once Li Yuan compared distances and directions, he became nearly certain it was the same estate he had visited before.

He looked at the map. North lay a stretch of wilderness leading back to Gemhill County, and farther west, beyond the mountains and a long mountain path, was Autumnlake County. Moving north, the number of demonic beasts would only increase. Meanwhile, the eerie estate sat to the east.