Chapter 541 – Researching the Power of the Human Emperor, A New Ghost Prison is Born - Part 2

A few days later.

From a distance, Li Yuan quietly watched.

In front of the old house, the Xie sisters had returned. Xie Yu carried a sword on her back, a crow perched on her shoulder, and in her arms was a tiny, sleepy-eyed baby girl.

Only then did Li Yuan finally let out a long breath of relief and leave.

The next morning, outside the gloom of the prison, there came a harsh

klang

as the lock turned. The heavy chains rattled and slapped against the iron gate.

The jailer bowed deeply as a mysterious figure stepped inside.

The man wore an ordinary cloak, worth maybe six large coppers on the street, and a plain paper mask that cost three. But no one dared underestimate him because of it.

“I’m taking two death row inmates with me today,” the figure said in a rasping voice.

The jailer answered reverently, “As you wish.”

He fetched the keys and handed them over without another word.

Of course, the mysterious man was none other than Li Yuan, here once more to conduct his experiments.

Before long, he emerged from the prison with two people in tow, a man and a woman.

The woman was a child trafficker. Despite Gemhill County’s repeated, ironclad bans on human trafficking, she just couldn’t resist. All it took was one wealthy family secretly offering a sky-high price for a child, and she caved.

The man was that very same wealthy noble.

After receiving the child from the trafficker, he hadn’t even had time to begin raising her before the county’s patrol picked up the scent. But he was ruthless. Instead of fleeing or denying it, he went straight to the darkest choice. He prepared to dispose of the child and cover his tracks.

Fortunately, just after he fed the child poison, the patrol kicked down the door, saved her life, and took him into custody.

“Our execution date hasn’t come yet! Gemhill County’s laws are strict! You can’t just take us away like this!”

the woman shrieked in panic, trying to intimidate Li Yuan with empty threats.

The wealthy man, on the other hand, spoke in a trembling, conciliatory tone. “Sir...where are you taking us?”

Li Yuan didn’t bother answering. With a swift motion, he struck both of them on the neck. They slumped unconscious. He tossed their bodies into a carriage, flashed a travel pass at the city gate, and rode out of Gemhill County without a hitch.

He didn’t stop until he reached a secluded forest by the lakeside.

Scooping up a handful of water, he splashed it on their faces. As the two prisoners coughed and blinked awake, Li Yuan said quietly, “I’m giving you a chance to live.”

“Live! Live!” The woman’s eyes lit up, wild with hope. “Sir, please tell us what to do!”

The rich man nodded frantically. “Yes, my lord, anything!”

Li Yuan dropped two scraps of paper on the ground. One bore the strange swirling vortex. The other, the crude character for

wood

.

“Each of you take one,” he said. “Then go your separate ways. Stare at it for an entire day. If you do that, I’ll reduce your sentences.”

“Reduce...my sentence?” The woman fell to her knees at once, bursting into tears. “Sir, I’m innocent! I swear it! I only took the child because her family was poor. I just wanted to send her somewhere better! To this gentleman’s house!”

“Hey...” The rich man’s face darkened; he opened his mouth to protest.

Li Yuan drew his blade. “Say another word, and there’ll be no sentence to reduce.”

Both prisoners froze.

The wealthy man quickly snatched up the scrap with the

wood

character. The trafficker hesitated, then picked up the one with the swirling vortex.

Li Yuan gestured toward the trees. “Each of you, 500 meters apart. Begin.”

At first, they both toyed with the idea of running. But after Li Yuan reappeared in front of them and casually left a few shallow cuts across their skin, they abandoned the thought. Trembling, they sat down and fixed their eyes on the paper.

Half an hour passed.

The rich man, clutching the

wood

character, suddenly grew uneasy. His gaze darted around as if something invisible were creeping closer. Sweat poured down his temples.

When Li Yuan appeared before him, he flinched and shouted, “Save me! Please, save me!”

“There’s nothing dangerous here,” Li Yuan said calmly.

The man opened his mouth to speak again, but the cold tip of a blade pressed against his throat.

Li Yuan’s expression didn’t change. “Keep looking.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest, the trafficker was growing restless. Her breathing became ragged, her muttering low and agitated. It was the same pattern Li Yuan had seen in his previous experiments.

Except this time, the environment was different.

That was what he wanted to test, whether a change in surroundings would alter the results.

An hour later, the rich man began to cry. He fell to his knees, sobbing uncontrollably.

Li Yuan appeared beside him.

“What are you begging for?”

The man’s words came out between gasps, his face streaked with snot and tears. “They’re coming...to kill me, so many, so many of them. Don’t let them... I don’t want to die. Please, I don’t want to die...”

Li Yuan asked, “Who’s trying to kill you?”

“I don’t know,” the man whimpered. “I don’t know, just please, don’t kill me!”

Without answering, Li Yuan turned and walked to the other side of the woods.

The trafficker was no longer trembling. Her face had twisted into something savage and unrecognizable. When she saw Li Yuan approach, she suddenly snatched up a sharp stone from the ground and without hesitation or sense of fear, lunged straight at him.

Li Yuan didn’t even raise a hand.

The trafficker lifted clean off the ground, suspended in midair. The scrap of paper floated before her eyes, unmoving.

With fourth rank domain power, Li Yuan might as well be a god to a mortal, capable of bending the world with a mere thought.

Just then, a sharp, bloodcurdling scream rang out from the other side of the forest.

Li Yuan turned his head and saw the wealthy man running for his life, tripping over roots and clawing at branches, his face twisted with sheer terror.

With a flick of thought, Li Yuan’s domain pulled him back like a ragdoll. He pinned both of them against separate trees, the scraps of paper once again hovering before their faces.

The experiment resumed.

Time crept forward.

Two hours in, the trafficker’s face had contorted into something monstrous. She was drenched in sweat, body trembling as she floated in the air like a puppet possessed.

The rich man wasn’t faring much better. His clothes were soaked with sweat, but his body was cold, clammy, the sweat of fear. And eventually, the fear overwhelmed him. He collapsed into unconsciousness.

Li Yuan studied the two.

But oddly enough, he felt nothing, no trace of Yin or Yang energy, no spiritual disturbance, no pulse of malice or illusion.

And that was strange.

He’d absorbed the withered flame. With nearly 20,000 ancestral seal seeds within his body, he had a sensitivity to spiritual fluctuations and elemental shifts that few could match. And right now, he was watching them both up close.

His brows drew together in thought.

The third hour arrived.

Then without warning the trafficker, who had been hanging in the air, let out a piercing scream, her face twisted in madness,

Her entire body ignited.

Flames didn’t erupt from her skin. They bloomed

inside

her. Fire flared in every cell, every inch of her flesh.

Li Yuan stepped forward, narrowing his eyes.

It was ordinary fire, not mystical, but its heat was intense. And it had killed her instantly. The moment it sparked, her body was already beyond saving.

“Just moving the location from a dungeon to a forest...and the reaction escalated from madness to spontaneous combustion?” Li Yuan mused, then shook his head. “No, not a change, an intensification. She

did

go mad before she burned. So, what’s the trigger...?”

A thought struck him. He jerked his head up and saw the sun.

It hung high above, bathing the woods in soft, brilliant spring light.

And in that golden glow, the sight of her still twitching charred corpse looked all the more grotesque.

“The sunlight? The dungeon barely gets any. But here in the forest, there’s much more. Could that be what caused the escalation?”

Suppressing his questions for now, Li Yuan turned back toward the other prisoner.

The rich man had gone utterly still. Somewhere during his unconscious state, he had died.

Li Yuan frowned. He reached out and grabbed the man’s arm, only to see something strange. Beneath the skin, pale gray lines of varying thickness had appeared.

He narrowed his eyes, pried the arm open, and made a careful cut with his finger.

Snap!

The arm broke at the joint, blood gushing out like a fountain. And then the gray lines beneath the skin came into focus.

Branches. They were branches.

FWOOSH! FWOOSH!

Two bursts of flame ignited midair, swallowing the bodies of both prisoners. In a moment, they were reduced to ash.

Li Yuan stepped silently to the ground, deep in thought.

This experiment had yielded three tentative conclusions.

First, the character—or rather, these strange radicals—could summon and harness the natural forces of the world.

Second, these forces reacted differently depending on the surrounding environment.

Third, he could look at them without consequence, but ordinary people could not.

“Should I start testing on martial artists in higher realms? Ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth rank...bring them in one by one and have them look?” Li Yuan mulled it over. After a while, he gave a faint nod and murmured to himself, “It’s worth a try.”

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Days passed.

Up north, chaos stirred. Many disciples from various sects fled south in droves, seeking refuge.

The Son of Heaven hadn’t yet made a move against the Bladessekers, and to many, that hesitation signaled something, perhaps there was something in the south that even he feared. Those unwilling to submit to the imperial court saw the south as their only sanctuary.

But Li Yuan didn’t intend to make things difficult for the Human Emperor. He had the Sheng’er issue a command to refuse sanctuary to all powerful refugees from the north.

Sure, there might be fourth rank cultivators among them. But Gemhill County already had the four Tree’ers, each one a third rank.

Even just one Tree’er was enough to hold the line at Antelope Pass. No one could cross.

Besides, no one would ever imagine Lady Divine Crow, the calm and quiet guardian at the county’s border, was the same one who had once summoned the massive stone fist and glacier on the barbarian battlefield. She wasn’t stupid either; she wore a mask whenever she was on duty.