"This continent..."
After leaving Yao Xian'er's secluded cave, Su Min immediately changed her attire. She now wore a loose, pitch-black robe that swallowed her form, a featureless mask, and a wide-brimmed hat that cast a deep shadow over her face, completely concealing her gender and features.
Of course, this outfit was also a treasure in its own right. Unless she unleashed her full power, even Mahayana experts wouldn't be able to detect her true identity or cultivation. After all, her soul power was exceptionally strong, a foundational advantage. With her tall stature and this comprehensive disguise, she was now utterly unidentifiable, a ghost in the darkness.
"Ahem, one two three, three two one... Testing, testing... Good."
Hearing her own artificially hoarse, androgynous voice, Su Min nodded in satisfaction.
"Walking around openly as a woman here would just be asking for trouble," she muttered to herself.
Then she surveyed the barren land stretching out before her. The sun hung dimly in the sky, a sickly orb casting a perpetual, blood red glow over everything. If she were some kind of solar powered hero, she'd probably be weakened here. But Su Min didn't care about the eerie sunlight. What truly bothered her was the profound desolation, the absolute lack of life that stretched endlessly in every direction.
This kind of scene was unthinkable in the Heavenly Continent. There, life flourished everywhere, with lush forests, fertile fields, and thriving cities, except in a few truly extreme environments. Under decent, stable rulers, most people lived relatively comfortable lives.
Especially after the recent rebirth of the world, when spiritual energy had surged to new heights, life had become even better. For example, crop yields there were absurd by her old world's standards. In the modern world she remembered, wheat might yield one thousand pounds per acre at best. But here? Four thousand pounds easily, and that was without any pesticides, all thanks to the nourishing, life giving spiritual energy permeating the very soil.
So most people in the Heavenly Continent lived relatively prosperous and safe lives. Unless their local rulers were outright tyrants, starvation was a rare tragedy.
But this place?
It was just barren. Desolate. A true wasteland.
Bones, both human and beast, littered the cracked, dry earth like macabre decorations. Even though she'd mentally prepared herself after talking with Yao Xian'er, the visceral reality of it still left Su Min taken aback.
"This is worse than the Great Wei Dynasty when I first arrived there," she observed, a grim set to her jaw.
She pulled out the informational materials Yao Xian'er had given her, focusing on the list of the Seven Dark Kings. Each was a formidable entity, at least at the early Mahayana Stage.
"Guess I will hunt them down one by one. It is as good a plan as any."
The jade slip clearly marked their general locations, and it seemed they were actively moving around, not staying in secluded cultivation. These so called kings had all ascended by forcibly fusing soul fragments, making their powerful, corrupted presences blatantly obvious beacons in the darkness to someone of her perception.
But the slip lacked detailed information about their specific abilities or personalities. And unlike Yao Xian'er, who sometimes favored a direct approach, Su Min wasn't reckless enough to charge in blindly without any intelligence.
"I need to scout first, get a feel for the land and its dangers. Maybe I can find some useful remains of a Solar Body cultivator or something similar along the way."
After carefully confirming that the nearest Mahayana expert was too far away to sense her spiritual probe, Su Min cautiously released a thread of her divine sense, letting it spread to cover a radius of several hundred kilometers.
Any further would be too risky. The dark energy here was too dense and corrosive, forcing her to consciously restrain her power to avoid detection. Yao Xian'er had said she needed over a century to recover, and that wasn't just from her physical injuries, but also from the tedious process of purging the lingering dark corruption from her body and soul.
Su Min, however, was fine, protected by her unique constitution. Her Five Elements Sacred Body, now at completion, provided strong, innate resistance to such corrupting influences.
"Hmm?"
Suddenly, she paused her scan. Within her detection range, she sensed the distinct energy signature of a cultivator, though a weak one, only at the early Golden Core Stage.
"The overall strength of the common folk here is... shockingly weak," she mused.
In a flash, she vanished from her spot, reappearing silently near a hidden cave entrance tucked into a hillside.
Even before entering, a nauseating, metallic stench of blood and decay assaulted her senses, so thick it was almost a physical presence.
"What the hell are these people doing in there?" she wondered, a deep disgust rising in her throat.
Curiosity getting the better of her, she probed inside with a delicate wisp of her divine sense, and immediately regretted it. Inside, a filthy, blood stained man with wild, matted hair and twisted, utterly insane eyes was muttering to himself, hunched over a crude, horrifying apparatus.
"Immortal pills... I must refine immortal pills... I will ascend, I will ascend..."
Then, with a disturbing, ritualistic calm, he picked up a small, limp form, a limbless little girl, and threw her into a large, hand cranked grinder.
There were no screams. Just the wet, grinding sound, and then pulp.
Her flesh and blood poured out of the grinder's spout, flowing directly into a massive, dark cauldron below that bubbled with a vile, black liquid.
"..."
Su Min's hand, hidden within her sleeve, clenched violently into a fist, her knuckles turning white.
The next second, the man found himself ripped from his cave and appearing in her iron like grip, his neck caught tightly in her fingers.
"G-g-gah?!"
The man had no idea what was happening. One moment, he was refining his medicine, the next, he was staring into the cold, shadowed eyes of death itself from within the mask.
Then, something truly bizarre happened.
His withered, aged face, caked in grime, twisted not in fear, but into an expression of ecstatic, fervent reverence. He reached out with his blood stained, grime covered hands as if to touch a deity.
"O Great One! I offer you abundant flesh and blood! O Bountiful Deity, grant me transcendence, grant me AAGHH"
POP.
Before he could finish his insane prayer, his head exploded like an overripe melon.
Su Min stared at the headless corpse now dangling from her hand. "..."
"What the fuck? Am I some kind of eldritch horror now?" she whispered in disbelief.
She had only leaked a sliver of her killing intent, hoping to intimidate him into giving up information. But instead, he had gone completely, terminally insane and his soul had self destructed.
"Did I just become a glimpse and go mad Lovecraftian entity?" she wondered, a strange, hollow feeling in her chest.
Shaking her head in grim acceptance, she incinerated the corpse with a thought, turning it to ash. She had planned to kill him anyway for his crimes, but this method was entirely unexpected.
The reason for his death was clear to her analytical mind.
His so called immortal pill refining involved grinding people, specifically those who carried soul fragments, into raw materials. He would then fuse those corrupted fragments directly into his own soul. But his soul had become a fractured, unstable mess. Faced with Su Min's overwhelming, pure spiritual pressure, it simply imploded, part of it trying to flee in terror, another part misinterpreting her as a divine being to worship. The conflicting impulses could not be contained.
The result? Splat.
As for his victims, the other poor souls trapped in the cave, Su Min mercilessly erased them too, a swift and painless release.
The moment the man died, the crude control marks he had placed on them vanished. But instead of fleeing for their freedom, they immediately turned on each other, tearing into each other's flesh with their teeth and nails like rabid beasts. They were just ordinary people, at most at the Body Refining Stage. In this hellish world, it seemed the only way they knew to grow stronger, to survive, was to consume others, absorbing their minuscule soul fragments through cannibalism.
Su Min could not bear to watch it. She released a controlled wisp of her Unity Stage aura, instantly crushing them all into unconsciousness and then a swift, painless death.
Then, with a flick of her finger, she summoned the lingering spiritual residue. A tiny, multicolored, but murky soul fragment floated into her palm.
"Too small, and far too polluted," she judged, feeling the chaotic, angry energy within.
She could not absorb it directly. She had to purify it first, using her own refined spiritual power to burn away the dark energy and the screaming memory residues, turning it into a wisp of pure, neutral soul energy.
But there was a significant catch.
If direct, reckless fusion gave a one hundred percent boost in power, however unstable, her careful purification method only yielded about one percent of the original fragment's potential energy.
"But at least there are no side effects, no risk of going mad or losing myself," she reaffirmed her decision.
She would never, ever recklessly fuse these corrupted things into her own soul, the very core of her being.
"My alchemy has hit a bottleneck anyway. Maybe this cursed place is an opportunity in disguise, a brutal way to gather soul energy for refinement."
With that thought, she purified the tiny fragment and absorbed the resulting wisp of energy.
For a Unity Stage expert like her, a Golden Core level fragment, even purified, was insignificant. It did not even cause a perceptible budge in her cultivation. It was a drop in a vast ocean.
She needed more. Much, much more.
Her gaze turned cold and determined as she looked toward the horizon, in the direction of the first Dark King on her list.
"Time to hunt a Mahayana."
~
In a flash of distorted space, Su Min reappeared high above a sprawling, walled city.
"This is... deeply depressing," she observed, her voice flat.
The city below housed what her divine sense quickly estimated to be five hundred thousand people, yet she could not detect a single true cultivator among them. Not one.
In the Heavenly Continent, even ordinary folks, with the abundant spiritual energy, could easily reach the Body Refining Stage. A city of this size would have naturally produced several Golden Core experts and countless Foundation Establishment disciples.
But here? There was nothing. A complete spiritual desert among the populace.
"This is the dark forest theory in its purest, most brutal form," she murmured. "The strong devour everything, leaving nothing for the weak to build upon."
Landing silently in a deserted alley, Su Min subtly shifted her appearance using her Earth Grade High Illusion Ring, transforming her disguised form into that of a frail, scholarly looking young man. She then strolled out into the main thoroughfare, immediately sensing the oppressive, fearful atmosphere that hung over the city like a pall. Choosing a dilapidated teahouse, she ordered some cheap tea and dried snacks and settled in to eavesdrop.
"Sigh... When will this end? It is almost time for the Fulu Mountain God's sacrifice again," one elderly man whispered to his companion, his voice trembling.
"What can we do? If the Mountain God is displeased, calamity will befall the entire city. The last time he was angry, the river ran red for a week," the other replied, his face ashen.
Su Min's eyes narrowed behind her illusory disguise.
Pulling out Yao Xian'er's map, she quickly located Fulu Mountain, a massive mountain range spanning nearly one hundred thousand kilometers, not far from the city.
"So the Mountain God is one of them," she thought, her lips thinning into a hard line.
In this twisted world, cultivators did not form sects or communities. They operated alone, driven by base instinct to kill and devour each other to grow stronger.
This Fulu Mountain God had undoubtedly claimed this territory as his own, demanding regular sacrifices, likely children who showed signs of possessing soul fragments, to sustain his own power and stave off the madness.
"Time to pay him a visit," Su Min decided.
A slow, predatory grin spread across her face, unseen beneath her illusions.
Why fight fair and announce her presence when she could ambush him in his own lair? Surprise was a weapon she knew how to wield well.