Netherworld Painted Skin Scroll

Chapter 303 All the Gods and Saints
Mei Qiulu rode a sword light that shone brightly, streaking across the night sky like a meteor, heading straight for the Tiangong Sect's headquarters.

Li Wuxiang concealed himself in the shadows, using his true energy to stretch his body into a terrifying form that resembled a corpse demon rather than a human, as he swept across the treetops in the shadows of the forest.

Then, the shooting star in the night sky suddenly paused for a moment in mid-air, and then showered down a rain of golden light—a loud rumble resounded from the Tiangong settlement and a large area of ​​woodland around it, huge plumes of smoke and dust rose up, flames, building debris, and rock fragments were all swept into the sky, and then gathered into an enormous mushroom cloud, slowly rising into the air!

The entire earth trembled, and after three breaths, the terrifying shockwave suddenly surged forth, snapping countless giant trees. A white light seemed to flash in the air. Li Wuxiang immediately pressed his body down, clinging tightly to the trunk of a giant tree. Sharp whistling filled his ears; he didn't know how many tiny objects were slamming into his body, nor how long it took for the shockwave to finally subside.

Looking further towards the Tiangong camp, everything became clear. From that camp as the epicenter, trees within a radius of several miles had all fallen in a radial pattern, lying flat on the ground, leaving only charred, bare trunks!
Senior Sister Mei is practically a human walking nuclear bomb... He realized that he was right before. The so-called "Ten Thousand Swords Return to the Origin" of the Juque Sect was a complete joke under the Xuanmen Orthodox Sword Qi of the Taiyi Sect!

A flash of golden light appeared in the air and then suddenly disappeared into the ground—Senior Sister Mei had rushed in.

Li Wuxiang immediately followed, and along the way, among the fallen, charred giant trees, he saw many remains of corpses. Flames still flickered on the giant trees, but the corpses were almost all grayish-white, as if they were about to turn to ashes.

Just when he thought these things were completely dead, he saw something move in the corpses—the bloodless "blood nerves" had also turned grayish-white, but they crawled out of the corpses and climbed aimlessly. After more than ten breaths, they gradually stiffened and stopped moving because they could not find anything to parasitize.

This thing is really hard to kill!

He swept straight to the encampment—the entire ground had been leveled, the topsoil blown away, exposing the rocks beneath. And those rocks, too, had been cut away by the sword energy, leaving them perfectly smooth and radiating heat.

A large, date-shaped hole remained where it had been, now perfectly smooth from the terrifying attack, as if it had been polished. Li Wuxiang rushed inside and found the cave to be extremely spacious, revealing that it had once contained stairs and walkways. But now, those structures had been reduced to dust, and the cave itself had been stripped of a thick layer, as if it had been scraped and ground; the stone walls were covered with countless sword marks!
Further inside, there were even more corpses, all dismembered by Mei Qiulu. Large patches of grayish-white blood vessels stood stiffly on the ground, and it was unknown how many corpses had lived here before.

There were still some of these things that weren't quite dead, so Li Wuxiang used his flying sword to check for any remaining ones, killing them all while listening to the huge roar from the depths of the cave.

When they reached a straight, upward passage, the cave finally retained some of its original appearance. From here on, there were not only sword marks, but also traces of flames and poisonous mist, indicating that the ghouls here had the ability to exchange a few blows with Mei Qiulu.

The blood vessels and nerves left behind in this straight passage were even more numerous, hidden in the crevices of the rocks, growing in clusters like clumps of plants. Li Wuxiang cleared them as he descended, and just as he was about to reach the passage below, he suddenly heard a short groan, like that of a person.

A ghoul escaped!?

He raised his hand and threw a sword towards the source of the sound. The sword light was brilliant, immediately illuminating the crevice in the rock—as soon as he saw what was hidden inside, he immediately waved his hand and retrieved the flying sword.

Because hidden inside was a complete head and half a bloodstained shoulder... it was Tang Qilang.

The reason Li Wuxiang stopped was because Tang Qilang's head looked different from what he had seen before. Within his half-body remains were wisps of bright red veins, likely remnants left after Mei Qiulu destroyed his blood nerves. These veins were spreading across other pieces of flesh in the crevices of the rocks, seemingly keeping him barely alive—his expression was pained, his brow furrowed, his mouth open, yet he appeared to be of sound mind.

Li Wuxiang landed beside him and leaned down to look at him: "Tang Qilang, do you still recognize me?"

Tang Qilang rolled his head and looked at him: "Li Wuxiang..."

After saying this, he seemed slightly dazed, as if he had returned to the state he was in when he became an immortal. Li Wuxiang immediately drew his sword and severed some of the blood nerves that were gradually branching out from the body parts beneath him. Tang Qilang shuddered in pain, but eventually regained his senses.

"Li Wuxiang... Li Wuxiang..." He murmured the name twice with a complicated expression, then suddenly cried out hysterically, "You'd better leave! You're going to die here! Neither you nor Mei Qiulu are a match for the division commanders!"

Li Wuxiang ignored his question and asked instead, "Was Kong Jingci killed by my Senior Sister Mei?"

"She...no, not yet...Li Wuxiang, we should thank you so much...Mei Qiulu said you pleaded for us, and Junior Sister Kong and the others have gone inside..."

From Youjiuyuan all the way to Dajie Mountain, Tang Qilang had treated Li Wuxiang very well. Although it was to win him over, he had still experienced a rare kindness from him. Hearing the rumbling below continuing, interspersed with human voices—all screams of agony—he stopped in a hurry, squatted down, and looked at Tang Qilang: "Tang Qi, did you know about the Yi Jin Jing of your Tiangong Sect?"

Tang Qilang's eyes darted around, his expression filled with sorrow: "What good does it do to know... all I know is the Yi Jin Jing... Li Wuxiang, we never... intended... this..."

Li Wuxiang sighed: "I know, it's all because of the True Lord of Fate."

"Not only...not only...I became an immortal, I saw that thing...not just the Lord of Fate..."

He was probably referring to the enormous dragon corpse in Mount Ling. Li Wuxiang nodded: "I know too. There are others in Mount Ling. Tang Qi, I'm going to kill you, while you're still lucid—"

"Yes, no... It's really... magnificent, grand, indescribable." Tang Qilang's eyes became dazed again, but Li Wuxiang could tell that it wasn't because he was about to become lost in thought again, but because he was recalling what Tang Qilang had said.

That's strange. The "Blood God" in Ling Mountain doesn't look magnificent or grand at all...

He suddenly remembered when he retreated from that "Crimson Sky"—Zhao Qi was so engrossed in trying to capture him, but it seemed as if something was holding him back. That thing was like threads controlling him, making him feel like a puppet on a string…

"Did you see Taiyi?"

“I don’t know, I don’t know, Li Wuxiang… It didn’t call itself Taiyi, it called itself Taizhuo…” Tang Qilang’s lips trembled as he muttered to himself, his eyes staring straight at Li Wuxiang’s back, as if he could see through his body and into the endless void. “One Qi transforms into three turbidities, one Qi transforms into three turbidities… three turbidities… Shangzhuo, Yuzhuo, Taizhuo… Ah, the Great Lord Taizhuo has come to take me, has come to take me…” Only then did Li Wuxiang notice that the blood and nerve meridians in his mangled body were beginning to wither and gradually turn grayish-white.

Tang Qilang's eyelids twitched and slowly closed. Li Wuxiang sighed, took out his flying sword and cut off his head. He then turned the head upside down and pulled out the meridians one by one like picking out worms. He then placed the head, which was probably not even clean anymore, on the ground, broke off a few stone pieces and hastily covered it up, making it a grave.

Li Wuxiang didn't know what the "Great Lord of Turbidity" was, but he stopped thinking about it. In truth, he wouldn't be surprised if the world were destroyed again tomorrow!

He leaped down. Below was a sloping road leading straight down, and at its end he saw a light. Because the road was so long, the light looked like a tiny red dot. He ran along the road, feeling increasingly hot as he went. Besides the sharp explosions from the fighting below, he heard a muffled, enormous background sound, as if at the end of the road was an enormous pot, and the water inside was boiling, cooking something.

That should be the interior of the Great Calamity Mountain. He guessed that the firelight was the glow emitted by the lava in the mountain.

After a dozen or so breaths, he finally reached the end of the passage and pressed himself against the cave wall like a sheet of paper, peering inside.

He was right. Mount Dajie was hollow, like a giant steamer—the opening was in the middle of the mountain's belly, and he could see a boiling lava lake below, orange-red, bubbling and churning, radiating endless heat. But it was more like a small, crimson ocean than a lake, because it was so vast!

The lava sea was vast, and so were the surrounding mountain walls. Yet, these massive mountain walls were almost entirely black. It wasn't the mountain's natural color, but rather the result of countless ghouls lurking within them.

The Golden Core Corpse Demons we saw before no longer resembled humans, but the Corpse Demons inside the Great Calamity Mountain were even less so—the vast majority didn't even have heads or eyes, but rather looked like things created by someone casually scribbling ink on paper with a brush. They were almost entirely black, containing some magical artifacts from the Thirty-Six Sects, connected by dark red blood nerve meridians, but without heads, eyeballs, or broken bones.

Li Wuxiang suddenly realized that when he looked at the Golden Core Corpse Demon before, he thought its body was full of internal organs and pus, which was extremely terrifying and disgusting. But that seemed to be a high-level version of the Corpse Demon—the higher the cultivation level, the more human-like it appeared!

As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he immediately looked carefully into the horde of corpses and found Mei Qiulu.

The fighting had ceased by the time he descended, and now only the wailing and howling of the corpses within the mountain could be heard. Because the sounds echoed within the mountain, they coalesced into a deafening gust of wind, almost identical to the howls of the vengeful ghosts in the sacred mountain.

The mountain was extremely vast; a person within it would be like a sesame seed falling into a pond. He had initially lost sight of Mei Qiulu. But now, looking around, he realized that these ghouls weren't randomly clinging to the mountainside—to the left of the cave entrance, directly to the east, the ghouls were growing larger and more repulsive.

Surrounded by them was a jutting boulder. Standing on that boulder were two people, one of whom was dressed in a Taoist robe and looked like a proper person.

As for the other one, when Li Wuxiang first looked at it from afar, he also thought it was a person, but when he looked at it a second time, he realized that something was wrong.

At this moment, Mei Qiulu was suspended in mid-air in front of the two men, no more than ten feet away, and they appeared to be talking. Both men in front of her were looking at her. However, when Li Wuxiang looked over, he felt that a second person was looking at him, and looking at him head-on.

The feeling was extremely strange. He saw the person's profile, but he felt that there was a full-face view on that profile. It was neither an illusion nor a hallucination; it was as if what he saw with his own eyes and what he perceived with his mind were completely different.

Senior Sister Mei's reaction was even stranger at this moment—she had been fighting her way through, but now she suddenly stopped and started talking to these two people... What were they talking about?
Because Li Wuxiang saw a rare look of hesitation on Mei Qiulu's face. If he were a little bolder, he could even feel that there was a sense of guilt in this hesitation, as if one of the two people was someone she knew!

At this moment, the second person suddenly spoke up: "Shut up!"

His voice seemed tangible. Because the instant those two words were uttered, Li Wuxiang saw a circle of light encircle the cave wall and vanish in an instant, traveling like lightning along the blood nerves and meridians within the numerous corpse demons.

The ghouls that had been whispering and howling just moments before fell silent at the same time. On the contrary, Li Wu felt a loud boom in his ears, as if the silence was accompanied by a deafening roar.

However, he realized that the person's voice was also strange—it sounded exactly like the Golden Core Corpse Demon he had encountered outside. The voice was not made by one person, but by many people coming together!
"Junior sister, what you saw before was just a fake embryo," the person said amidst the rumbling of underground magma.

Junior Sister!? This person is called Junior Sister Mei Qiulu!?
"You see them as not human, with terrifying appearances and strange temperaments, but that's only because they haven't yet been refined into immortal embryos."

He took a step forward on the stone platform: "If one becomes an immortal or a saint, one will naturally have a solemn and dignified appearance, no longer resembling before. Junior sister, as you fought your way here, did you see anyone harming their fellow disciples within this Blood God Dojo?"

He raised his arms, turned around and looked around: "These are all disciples of the former thirty-six sects. Many of them had grudges against each other, but now they are all happy and united as brothers. Isn't this exactly the kind of brotherhood that the Taiyi Sect wanted in the past? If it weren't for this, in this world, can you imagine what kind of trouble these people would cause for rare and precious materials, elixirs and magical products?"

"I brought you here for two reasons. First, because we were once fellow disciples, I know your character—you dislike worldly constraints the most, cherish chivalry and are more likely to understand what we are doing. Second, our sect's Yang Sheng Divine Embryo truly needs you." As the man said this, his body suddenly trembled slightly, and Li Wuxiang's pupils immediately dilated—

With a whoosh, countless human figures flew out of his body and stood in the void, surrounding Mei Qiulu!

Those humanoid figures all had a golden glow on them, looking ethereal and otherworldly. They were dressed as cultivators from the Thirty-Six Sects and each held a magical weapon. In that instant, they seemed as if all the gods and saints had descended, truly achieving enlightenment and attaining immortality!

But... wait, there weren't thirty-six people, but thirty-seven... After those figures materialized from this body, Li Wuxiang immediately recognized the person who had spoken—

It's... Choi Do-sung!

(End of this chapter)