Achieving physical sainthood begins with the Iron Shirt technique!

Lu Chen picked at his ear, not even glancing at the dark clouds in the sky.

The affected, ethereal music was repelled by the magic array and quickly dissipated in the clouds, all bark and no bite.

In the center of the plaza, the core of the blood sacrifice array had been completely reduced to a pile of scrap metal. The blood pool, which had been bubbling and gurgling, had just begun to emit its sticky, malevolent aura when it encountered the pure yang blood fire emanating from Lu Chen's body, producing an extremely piercing hissing sound. The entire pool of poisonous water was burned by the high temperature into acrid white steam, which dissipated completely in the cold wind.

Thousands of impoverished and disabled people threw away the broken pickaxes they used to dig stones.

The heavy iron shackles were completely destroyed by the formation. The remnants of the lower realm gathered around the edge of the altar, panting heavily as they looked at the pools of blood on the ground and the mangled flesh of the celestial beings. The initial bewilderment on their faces was quickly replaced by a frenzied ecstasy. Hundreds of severely wounded miners, lying in the mud, scrambled to their feet, helping each other up, trembling with excitement.

Lu Chen strode towards the back of the altar. The gate to the mine supervisor's private treasury blocked his way, with two feet thick basalt stones covered by gleaming golden sealing talismans.

The large black iron boot suddenly lifted up.

A powerful kick!

The stone gate, along with the several high-level talismans on it, instantly shattered into countless fragments. Lu Chen stretched out his hand and dragged out several heavy boxes made of Xuan Yin wood from the dark cave entrance.

The lid of the box, edged with black iron, was kicked off violently. It was piled high with bright red blood spirit mushrooms, and underneath lay glistening, plump low-grade spirit grains.

An old miner with half an arm missing came closer and took a look. He burst into tears on the spot, his remaining arm digging into the blood-stained floor tiles.

"The immortals have committed atrocities! These are all tributes we risked our lives to dig up the roots of our mountains, and those old geezers usually use these top-grade spiritual items to offer to Nascent Soul elders, and even to feed their captive cranes, not giving us, the common people, even a scrap!"

Lu Chen's brows furrowed. He knew all too well the physical condition of these disabled people; their bodies had long been drained by the heavy manual labor. If these poor souls were to eat this pile of immortal medicinal herbs containing violent spiritual energy raw, they simply wouldn't be able to suppress the domineering medicinal power, and would explode and die on the spot.

He turned around, his thick arms sweeping through a pile of scrap metal in the ruins, and pulled out a large, black iron cauldron, several people wide. This thing was usually used to boil tree bark for the laborers.

Lu Chen slammed the large pot down on the open ground with one hand.

"Go fetch water! Fill it up!"

Dozens of strong men, carrying wooden buckets, frantically drew water a thousand times cleaner from the deep well in the mine, filling the large iron pot almost to the brim. Lu Chen grabbed the several large boxes of bird feed, skin and bones included, and poured them all into the water in the iron pot.

He didn't even bother to gather a piece of firewood; instead, he lowered himself and sat cross-legged in the sunken pit under the large iron pot.

The dark membrane stretched taut in the steam, its thick veins bulging. Lu Chen spread his arms wide, pressing them firmly against the bottom of the cauldron. The Supreme Blood Furnace in his chest emitted a low, muffled rumble. An extremely gentle stream of heat surged from his palms, instantly enveloping the entire bottom of the cauldron. He suppressed the violent killing intent of this pure Yang blood fire, transforming it into the fiercest furnace flame.

The extremely demanding slow simmering process began.

The clear water in the pot boiled rapidly. Thick white foam rose to the surface, the most violent immortal impurities from the spirit grain and blood spirit mushroom. Passed through by the pure yang blood fire, these domineering energies, capable of bursting a mortal's meridians, were forcibly incinerated, turning into black ash and drifting away. Only a faint, yet lingering and mellow, medicinal aroma remained in the large pot. A large pot of extremely nourishing spiritual porridge was thus prepared.

Lu Chen put away the flames in his palm and shook the sweat off the back of his hand.

"Come and get some! One bowl each, and don't leave any!"

Thousands of laborers, carrying broken pottery bowls, lined up with red eyes, their eyes gleaming. After each bowl of warm, nourishing porridge was swallowed, an incredible commotion erupted from the crowd. Those severely wounded who lay on the ground, unable to rise, felt a warm current flow through their bodies. Their whip marks and lacerations stopped bleeding at an astonishing speed, forming thick, hard scabs.

That's not all. From their lower abdomens, a faint, dark red glow emanated, invisible to ordinary people.

Lu Chen tugged at his collar. While cooking this pot of spiritual porridge, he naturally planted a tiny seed of cold resistance into the bodies of these survivors of the Great Wilderness. With this seed, as long as these people left this place, no matter how cold the Great Wilderness was or how poisonous the damp miasma was, it would not be able to stop them from surviving.

The thick, dark gold blood cocoon on her chest was removed after the battle. Anan, wrapped in her tattered little cotton-padded jacket, sat quietly on a relatively clean large blue stone in a corner of the altar.

The little girl held the one-eared rag doll tightly in her arms, her body motionless. Through the thick, blood-jade eye-covering garment bound to her face, she could clearly sense the gratitude and warmth emanating from the mortals around her.

There were some sounds coming from the crowd.

A skinny little girl with pigtails, so thin she was practically skin and bones, walked barefoot and carefully squeezed out from between the adults' legs. She stopped timidly in front of Anan, her two small hands, still covered in chilblains, stretched out. In her palms, she clutched a small, clean half-eaten wheat cake, not a speck of mud on it.

This was the life-saving ration that the little girl had hidden in the crevices of the rocks in the black iron mine for half a month, and she hadn't been able to bear eating it.

A-Nan tilted her head. She gently inhaled twice through her little nose.

She didn't flinch, but stretched out her small hands, which Lu Chen had wiped clean, and steadily took the half-piece of wheat cake.

With a quick movement of her hands, the little girl snapped the small wheat cake in half along the grain of the dough. One piece was bigger, and the other smaller.

She stuffed the smaller piece into her tattered pocket, then stood up, precisely avoiding the crater in the ground, and walked towards Lu Chen, who had just jumped out of the large pit at the bottom of the pot.

Walking up to Lu Chen, A'nan stood on tiptoe, raising her chubby little hand high. Without any unnecessary movements, she very naturally stuffed the half-eaten barley cake into Lu Chen's big mouth.

Lu Chen clenched his two rows of gleaming white teeth. The rough, coarse grains crunched loudly in his mouth. He swallowed them in a few bites, then roughly ruffled A-Nan's messy hair with his large, calloused hands.

A-Nan instinctively grabbed the corner of Lu Chen's rough cloth shirt, which was full of holes and stained with mud and blood. The little girl turned around and pointed to the deepest part of the mining area, the darkest part of the back mountain.

"Lu Chen, there's a very thick, black iron snake down there that keeps crying, and there are a lot of yellow paper strips on its body."

The blind girl's words left the old miners holding bowls around her completely bewildered. Lu Chen, however, didn't hesitate for a moment. What the Primordial True Vision Eyes could see was absolutely infallible.

Lu Chen didn't ask what the giant iron snake was; instead, he slapped the old miner next to him on the shoulder.

"Grab the remaining provisions and herbs, and get out of the mountains with the men! This wretched place won't keep us!"

He strode past the crowd and plunged into the back mountain deep within the mining area.

The surrounding temperature dropped lower and lower, and a thick layer of white frost condensed on the black rocks on the ground. Lu Chen walked to a bottomless cliff, suddenly raised his large black iron boots, and slammed them heavily onto the ground with tremendous force.

"Boom!"

Huge cracks, each ten feet wide, burst forth wildly in all directions from beneath his feet. Large chunks of mud and rock collapsed into the ground. His ultimate senses, cultivated through the tremors of the earth, extended frantically into the ground.

Lu Chen's brows furrowed instantly.

The extreme cold that surged upwards from the large black boots carried an intensely dense, bloody aura of death. This chilling aura was not some natural yin vein. Deep within the earth's layers, a viciously concealed, extremely cold array was entrenched. The dense, deathly aura of the earth's veins had formed a massive lock, sealing away all life and creation within the earth's core.

"What a ruthless move, using the death energy of the earth's veins to forcibly lock away creation!" Lu Chen unfastened a century-old black iron chain from his waist. "Go and take it!"

With both hands, Lu Chen gently sheltered A'Nan inside the thick, dark wolfskin pouch on his chest. He then shouldered the 100,000-jin (approximately 50,000 kg) Primordial Ferocious Bone Tablet from the Heaven-Suppressing Wilderness once more, the black iron chains tightly binding his wrists.

Lu Chen's incredibly powerful body left a violent, dark red afterimage along the edge of the gloomy valley. An overwhelming, invisible killing intent instantly pierced through the rock layers, locking onto the vital point of the insidious formation deep underground, before plunging headlong into the dark, deep valley behind the mountain!