Ren Qing had encountered Turbid Immortals that had already advanced to Earth Immortal, but he had never met one like Chen Changsheng, who was still at the Heavenly Dao transformation stage of the Heavenly Aberration realm.
The feeling he gave him was extremely strange, an uncomfortable sensation like a fishbone stuck in the throat.
Ren Qing glanced around.
Although the number of Longevity Immortals was constantly increasing, the various branches worked together well and had not fallen into a disadvantageous position.
The Yang Spirit cultivators sat firmly in place, standing atop the city walls without taking action.
This battle was more like a rehearsal, preparation for when the curtain of the greater situation would be raised in the future and the Restraint Officers' Hall would step from behind the scenes to center stage.
"Help me become an immortal!!!"
"I can protect the Restraint Officers' Hall for eternity..."
"They're still alive, still alive, inside my stomach..."
Chen Changsheng continuously roared.
His roots gradually pulled free from the ground, dragging out shocking piles of corpses, enough skulls to form mountains.
The ghost shadow beneath Ren Qing's feet squirmed, transforming in the blink of an eye into a giant black horned coiling dragon, carrying him toward Chen Changsheng.
Newly born Longevity Immortals constantly attempted to intercept him along the way.
Yet before they could even approach Ren Qing, they suddenly clutched their chests and abdomens and cried out in agony.
Their ribs burst through flesh, their internal organs grew uncontrollably, and countless complications instantly reduced them to dry skeletons.
After Ren Qing came within a thousand meters, Chen Changsheng instead recovered a trace of rationality.
With a ferocious bird head atop his neck, pale yellow saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth before quickly vaporizing, containing terrifying pathogens.
Ren Qing was practically immune to pathogens by now.
Anything he inhaled could simply be sent into the Mud Pellet Palace and handed over to the diseased tree.
Against the backdrop of the grand-scale battle between the Restraint Officers' Hall and the Longevity Immortals, the two of them appeared exceptionally calm, remaining silent for a long time.
In the end, Ren Qing spoke first.
"Chen Changsheng, where did your immortal position come from?"
Chen Changsheng could not help retching a few times again.
This time, however, he forcibly suppressed the head emerging from his throat and looked at Ren Qing with extremely complicated eyes.
Just as he wanted to explain something, his body suddenly began falling apart, and the signs of flesh undergoing Heavenly Dao transformation became even stronger.
"Kill me..."
"Or help me become immortal..."
Chen Changsheng bit toward Ren Qing.
A fishy wind rushed from his mouth, revealing that everything inside him had already completely decayed.
Ren Qing sidestepped the attack.
At the same time, yin energy stored within the Stomach World surged into his body.
Every part of his body completed corpse transformation at a visible rate.
One moment he looked like a living human, the next he had become a zombie.
Ren Qing gathered a bit of strength and punched Chen Changsheng square in the face.
Chen Changsheng's head caved in and crashed heavily to the ground.
Countless white skeletal figures crawled out of the wound and began gnawing on his flesh.
The enhancement to physical strength provided by Corpse Fengdu was obvious.
Seeing that communication was impossible, Ren Qing stopped wasting words.
Punch after punch landed on Chen Changsheng while simultaneously using the bacterial soul to sense his soul.
The clash between the two shook heaven and earth.
The ground, already covered in cracks, was now filled with deep meteor-like craters.
Chen Changsheng occasionally counterattacked, but every attack was blocked by Ren Qing.
Daoist Taihan was somewhat puzzled.
Chen Changsheng's strength was only at the Heavenly Aberration realm, so why was Ren Qing, a Fortune Virtue Earth Immortal, not revealing his true form?
He looked toward the ghost shadow beneath Ren Qing's feet and felt an inexplicable palpitation.
Bang!!
Chen Changsheng's head shattered once more.
After a new head emerged, his aura actually rose noticeably, and his appearance drew closer to that of a Turbid Immortal.
Ren Qing narrowed his eyes and summoned the ghost shadow to attach itself to his body, entering a half-dragon transformation.
The sound of bones colliding rang out.
His height grew from just over two meters to more than a hundred meters in the blink of an eye, becoming a dragon-headed humanoid monster.
Dressed in embroidered robes, with gray-black skin, Ren Qing resembled the King of Hell from the underworld.
He truly displayed a trace of the lingering majesty of the Fengdu Corpse Emperor.
A Heavenly Dao Insect resembling a long serpent coiled around his right arm as he once again engaged Chen Changsheng in close combat.
Mountains collapsed and the sea of clouds tore apart.
Yet the Longevity Forbidden Zone, despite being a Yang Spirit realm forbidden zone, showed no signs of collapse whatsoever.
This was somewhat beyond Ren Qing's expectations.
The Longevity Forbidden Zone truly differed from ordinary forbidden zones.
Daoist Taihan's pupils contracted.
The pressure radiating from Ren Qing left him unable to breathe, like prey instinctively encountering its natural predator.
The hurricane howled across the entire forbidden zone.
Naturally, the wind carried pathogens.
Even the ruins of Sanxiang City in the outside world began showing signs of violent tremors.
The Restraint Officers' Hall inevitably suffered from the aftershocks.
Before the battle had even produced a victor, multiple cultivators had already begun coughing and running fevers.
The Longevity Immortals fared no better.
Even though their umbilical cords connected them to Chen Changsheng, that did not mean they were immune to the horrors of plague.
After receiving Ren Qing's message, the Yang Spirit cultivators ordered all cultivators to retreat back into Wuwei City as quickly as possible.
Daoist Taihan took out a human-skin banner.
Just as he was preparing to display his strength and establish his status, he noticed Li Tiangang casually pulling out a sheet of paper.
The divine ability "Embracing Books Hundred Cities" was unleashed.
With a flick of his right arm, landscapes and beautiful scenery flashed past, causing nearly a hundred Longevity Immortals to vanish.
The surfaces of the paper sheets displayed the Longevity Immortals, frozen within them and unable to move.
Li Yaoyang opened his mouth and spat.
A dense swarm of insects poured from his body, mixed with traces of several natal Gu insects.
Although more than half the swarm died due to disease, the natal Gu insects at the center rapidly produced eggs.
Within a few breaths, larvae hatched and swelled in size with the wind.
The larvae's resistance to disease increased dramatically.
After several generations, they had completely adapted to the diseases contained within the hurricane.
Li Yaoyang's divine ability was called "Mayfly Dawn and Dusk."
By consuming lifespan, it could stimulate insect eggs to mature into adults in a short period of time.
The two cultivators of the Restraint Officer Method easily wiped out the Longevity Immortals.
Daoist Taihan and the Corpse Ghost never even got the chance to act.
In truth, Li Tiangang indeed intended to establish authority.
The Restraint Officer Method was far more difficult to cultivate than ordinary techniques, but the strength it granted was extraordinary, especially the divine abilities nurtured at the peak of the Yin Difference realm.
Li Yaoyang, meanwhile, was simply testing his Gu insects.
Even though his temples had turned gray from the loss of lifespan, he still appeared somewhat unsatisfied.
The remaining cultivators supported one another as they returned to Wuwei City.
Disease was spreading through their bodies, and only after approaching the Forbidden Realm did their injuries stabilize.
Wuwei City immediately chose to become a turtle hiding in its shell.
Its arms dug pits into the ground to bury itself, and then the protective artifacts shielding the city walls were activated.
The city became pitch black.
Only the candlelight of lanterns illuminated the streets.
Thump, thump, thump, thump...
The commotion outside seemed capable of shattering heaven and earth.
Yet all they could hear was Chen Changsheng's one-sided roaring.
Not a single sound came from Ren Qing.
If they could see outside, they would discover that Ren Qing could not be found at all.
Only Chen Changsheng remained in place, crazily smashing into the ground.
His body had already undergone more than half a corpse transformation and had even generated a faint trace of yin energy.
Once Chen Changsheng completed his corpse transformation, no one at the same realm could possibly be Ren Qing's opponent.
Corpse Fengdu controlled all yin energy in the world and naturally restrained zombies as well.
The moment Chen Changsheng was corroded by yin energy and transformed into a corpse, Ren Qing stood in an invincible position.
"I am Boqiang, revered by countless living beings, immortal for eternity..."
One head after another exploded on Chen Changsheng's body.
He became extraordinarily obsessive.
Unable to devour the souls of living beings, he actually began eating himself.
He stuffed his own branches into his mouth and continuously swallowed them.
On one hand, Chen Changsheng was suppressing his body from being driven by madness.
On the other hand, he discovered that he could not stop the process at all.
The despair in his eyes made it clear that death might actually be a form of release.
Without anyone noticing, Ren Qing had already entered Chen Changsheng's body.
He moved through the flesh, attempting to locate the soul.
He very much wanted to understand exactly how Chen Changsheng had absorbed the immortal position.
Although Chen Changsheng's body was over a thousand meters long, most of it was occupied by his spine.
The flesh intertwined like the roots of a plant.
Ren Qing walked directly toward the head, causing Chen Changsheng to become even more frenzied.
When he stood before Chen Changsheng's brain, fine beads of cold sweat involuntarily appeared across his body.
He even felt a terrifying sense of dread.
Chen Changsheng's brain was located in his throat.
However, it was not a brain in the conventional sense.
It was an indescribable mass.
A sticky, irregular liquid.
Bubbles constantly emerged on its surface, only to transform into bird heads before fully forming.
Ren Qing could not help summoning the information stream.
[Boqiang Wind God]
[Immortal Position: Earth Immortal (Turbid)]
[Ascension Method: Wind-Treading Art]
[Wind-Treading Art]
[Inscribed upon the right leg bone of the Primordial Heavenly Venerable. Cultivation requires hanging at a wind outlet for three years and slicing off three hundred pieces of flesh every seven days. If one survives, the method is successfully cultivated.]
Ren Qing was stunned by the amount of information carried by the immortal position.
For a moment, he stood frozen.
Could the most primitive immortal positions actually originate from the corpses of the Three Dao Ancestors?
Then why had the Three Dao Ancestors died?
And if they had truly perished, what exactly were the things hiding inside the statues of the Three Dao Ancestors?
Looking at the Boqiang Wind God immortal position, Ren Qing was certain it was connected to the Primordial Heavenly Venerable because the style was strikingly similar.
Ren Qing suddenly noticed that during Chen Changsheng's Heavenly Dao transformation process, the Boqiang Wind God immortal position seemed to be becoming increasingly strange.
To be precise, it was maintaining the immortal position's Heavenly Dao transformation.
"Save me..."
Chen Changsheng's soul surfaced upon the immortal position.
Its appearance had already become distorted.
No matter how one looked at it, the Longevity Forbidden Zone was a trap.
Chen Changsheng had clearly fallen victim to it.
Ren Qing attempted to extract the soul.
To his surprise, he peeled it away from the immortal position with remarkable ease.
Only a burning sensation appeared on the palm that made contact.
The Heavenly Dao Crack seemed to expand by an almost imperceptible amount.
Ren Qing quickly threw the soul into the Stomach World and cast it into the Flesh Furnace to be burned.
Whether consciousness could be restored would depend on fate.
Without its soul, the Heavenly Dao-transformed body completely lost all reason.
The Boqiang Wind God, however, began recovering at a slow pace.
At the current rate of Heavenly Dao transformation, it would likely require at least a thousand years.
This proved that the Heavenly Dao transformation of a True Immortal was almost irreversible.
An immortal position, however, was different.
It showed that immortal positions endured, while immortals themselves did not.
Ren Qing guessed that once a Turbid Immortal Position reverted into a Weird Immortal Position, it would likely attract the attention of other Turbid Immortals.
It was entirely a hot potato.
His outstretched hand paused in midair.
The Boqiang Wind God immortal position brought more harm than benefit to Ren Qing.
The Longevity Forbidden Zone was likewise troublesome and would drag him into someone else's arrangements.
It would be better used as part of a scheme...
Ren Qing narrowed his eyes.
His figure disappeared from before the immortal position.
He then reappeared atop Chen Changsheng's head.
Before the latter could react, Ren Qing mobilized all the yin energy and pressed downward with tremendous force.
A shockwave swept outward.
Inside Wuwei City, people were thrown off their feet.
Chen Changsheng's body was driven into the earth.
A gigantic grave mound then rose up, decorated with white bones and corpses, sealing away the Boqiang Wind God immortal position.
Ren Qing's eyes flickered.
From time to time, he looked in the direction of Jingzhou.