The weakest martial artist? One punch and he's leveled up a whole realm!

The next ten years.

The capital city has become a giant meat grinder.

Prisoners, slaves, and refugees from all over the country were continuously transported in.

They were dressed in uniform gray prison uniforms, with spiritual energy shackles around their necks, and were driven to jump into the spiritual vein node.

The spiritual energy shackles would extract their life essence and inject it into the earth's veins, while their corpses would be dragged out and thrown into the furnace to become raw materials for spiritual jade.

No one has ever counted the number of deaths.

However, subsequent engineering records show that a large amount of ashes and blood mud were mixed into the foundation of the nine-tiered palace.

The white jade on the city wall, smooth and lustrous like jade, would tinge with a faint pink hue under the moonlight.

Those are the marks left by blood seeping into the jade.

This history.

It comes from the "Annals of Emperors" and "History of Noble Families" from five hundred years ago.

.......

Ye Xiao and Grandpa Hei sat by the window in a teahouse.

Grandpa Hei led the way in experiencing daily life in the Immortal City.

At the same time, she slowly told Ye Xiao about the past history of this nine-tiered palace.

,,,,,,,

Even more secretive is...

The blood in the foundation is not just that of ordinary people.

The twelve families secretly captured abyssal monsters from the rifts and the edge of the abyss.

They were then thrown into the veil node along with the prisoners.

When monster blood mixes with human blood, a peculiar chemical reaction occurs.

It can increase the efficiency of spiritual energy conduction of the spirit jade by three times.

The price is that the soul of the one who is thrown in is forever trapped in the foundation, becoming the "gatekeeper" of the nine-layered palace.

This massive project lasted for fifty years.

The first palace was only just beginning to take shape 450 years ago.

Thirty years later, the second section was completed.

......

Fifty years later, the fifth layer of levitation appeared.

The final three layers—the seventh, eighth, and ninth layers.

It took a full 120 years to build them!

They float above the clouds and require extremely high spiritual power and the purest spiritual veins for energy.

To build them, the Alliance tripled the rate at which it drew demonic energy from the rifts.

That year, the number of small cracks worldwide surged from twenty-three to seventy-eight.

......

Ye Xiao stared at the old man in black, listening to him recount this little-known story about the construction of the Nine-Layered Palace.

He was stunned for a moment, and the tea beside him had gone cold, and he didn't even have time to take a sip.

"Uncle Blackie, are the small cracks the same thing as the eighty-eight cracks in the world today?"

The old man shook his head.

"That is naturally not a single thing. What you call the eighty-eight cracks are essentially boundary marks."

"This is the intersection where two worlds come together."

"But small cracks are different; they're more like spatial holes."

Ye Xiao nodded in sudden realization.

But then a new question arose in his mind.

What lies beyond the spatial rift?

"abyss."

The old man's answer was very simple and straightforward.

"However, these small cracks are not beyond repair."

"Because the area itself is relatively small, probably only a few square meters."

"With the strength of an extraordinary individual, most of them can be repaired."

Ye Xiao asked, "What are the downsides?"

The old man looked at the boy in front of him with a meaningful expression.

The boy immediately noticed something that others had missed.

Others heard that it could be fixed.

They simply won't bother asking any more questions.

But Ye Xiao asked what kind of aftereffects the repaired small cracks would leave.

"Of course, there are downsides."

Grandpa Hei chose to explain using a metaphor.

"It's like kneading dough; once the dough is shaped, it's a perfectly round shape."

"Yes." Ye Xiao nodded.

"If a hole appeared in the dough, what would you do?"

Ye Xiao immediately replied, "It's very simple. Just spread some dough from the rest of the dough and fill in the hole."

The old man smirked: "Yes, that's how most people think. When kneading dough, if there are holes in the dough, you can just spread some dough from the side and smooth it out."

"But here's the problem: the dough used to fill the hole came from other parts of this dough, not from wheat flour that was then mixed with water and kneaded."

"Ye Xiao, have you figured out the problem yet?"

Ye Xiao suddenly realized.

He had already understood the old man's analogy.

"I understand, Uncle Black. Each small crack is like a small hole in a pancake. Although superhumans can plug them up, the method they use is like robbing Peter to pay Paul!"

The old man smiled, as if to say, "This child is teachable."

"Yes, the material used to repair small cracks originates from the human world, but these materials didn't appear out of thin air, and their total quantity is decreasing!"

Ye Xiao immediately continued from where the old man in black left off.

"In other words, the human world, like a pancake, will gradually be kneaded thinner and thinner until, in the end, it'll be like a balloon that bursts with the slightest breath!"

The old man sighed, "Yes, that's exactly how it is."

Ye Xiao frowned, a surge of anger rising in his heart.

"Didn't those important figures, those in positions of power, ever consider this question?"

Ye Xiao didn't believe that these people hadn't considered this kind of survival crisis.

The old man said, "Of course I've considered it."

"However, that was five hundred years ago. Back then, Xuanyuan Cang and the other two founders of the human alliance had a very simple idea, only one."

"What are your thoughts?"

"After me, who cares if the world is flooded!"

"......"

Ye Xiao fell into a powerless silence.

.....

Regarding the selection of the site and construction of the nine-tiered palace.

There is also a little-known story from the past.

The initial site selection was personally determined by Xuanyuan Cang, who surveyed the foundation of the Nine-Tiered Palace.

Each level corresponds to a spiritual vein node.

The nine-tiered palace requires nine spiritual veins to supply energy simultaneously in order to maintain all its functions, such as levitation, defense, and spiritual energy circulation.

The problem is that three of the nine spiritual veins are contaminated.

The abyssal demonic energy left over from the ancient war permeated those three spiritual veins, making them unusable directly.

The engineers came up with a solution.

Artificial purification!

The method is simple: throw a large number of living people into the spiritual vein nodes, and use their life essence as a price to "replace" the demonic energy.

One person can purify a fist-sized area of ​​demonic energy.

The total amount of purification required for the nine spiritual veins is 300,000 people.

The lives of 300,000 people were exchanged for a city.

Xuanyuan Cang approved it!

This is why most of the people who built the nine-tiered palace were prisoners, slaves, and refugees.