Mo Fan was unaware of everything happening in the outside world. He had originally planned to stay hidden underground, quietly waiting for the Dragon Ruins entrance to open.
Yet suddenly, something occurred that made his scalp tingle.
A crack in space abruptly appeared in the cave abode, merely a zhang away from him!
“Space fissures are appearing more and more frequently. Even underground now. This means the entire space is becoming increasingly unstable…”
Mo Fan murmured, immediately realising he could no longer remain here!
At the same time, he released his divine sense, enveloping a ten-zhang radius around him. This would allow him to detect nearby spatial changes instantly and avoid the dangers posed by space fissures.
Without further hesitation, he employed his earth escape divine ability and headed towards the surface.
Soon after, he emerged from underground and returned to the surface. However, what Mo Fan saw was a scene of devastation.
The surrounding ground was littered with shattered wood fragments, along with the severed limbs and blood of cultivators.
Had he arrived at some previous battlefield?
Mo Fan’s gaze sharpened, a greater sense of caution rising in his heart. Then, his vast divine sense spread outwards, surveying everything around him.
At the same time, he looked up at the sky, but no figures appeared.
Under his divine sense, Mo Fan discovered that this area had been destroyed across more than twenty li.
Yet even after extending his divine sense to its maximum range, he still found no living cultivators.
“Could all the cultivators on this island have been slaughtered?”
Mo Fan frowned, then demonic energy surged within his body.
Divine ability: Turn the Living into Ghosts!
The next moment, a golden tiger pattern emerged on his brow. Silently, a white tiger phantom appeared behind Mo Fan, causing the world in his eyes to turn black and white.
This time, he saw numerous grey figures.
These figures were the cultivators who had died in the island’s conflicts, both human and demonic.
“Since I cannot find the living, I will question the dead to learn what exactly happened.”
Mo Fan’s eyes flickered, and he once again urged the power of his divine ability.
“Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh…!!”
Golden divine chains shot out from the tiger pattern, piercing through the wandering souls in the distance, then rapidly capturing and pulling them back.
In just a short quarter of an hour, Mo Fan had captured all these wandering souls completely.
It is worth mentioning that as his cultivation continued to break through, the ghost space within his body had gradually become enormous.
Now, his internal ghost space had expanded a hundredfold from its original few cubic metres, naturally allowing it to accommodate far more ghosts.
This time, he had captured a full several hundred wandering souls.
In his view, these wandering souls were important strategic resources. Once transformed into ghosts, each possessed considerable combat strength, so he would not let a single one escape.
One must remember that the cultivators who entered this place were all aiming for the Dragon Ruins.
And the Dragon Ruins was an extremely dangerous location. Those who went inside to seek treasures, aside from a small portion gambling their lives for a future, were cultivators extremely confident in their strength, the elites of various sects or demon mountains.
After all the wandering souls had been transformed into ghosts, Mo Fan discovered, to his surprise, that among them were three Core Formation cultivators and one Demon King. The rest were all Foundation Establishment stage or Demon Generals.
This discovery delighted Mo Fan. Soon, he summoned the ghosts transformed from the three Core Formation cultivators and the Demon King.
“We pay respects to the master!”
The four ghosts bowed respectfully to Mo Fan the moment they appeared!
Mo Fan nodded. As their absolute master, he could clearly discern the thoughts in these four ghosts’ minds.
At this moment, their feelings towards Mo Fan were more fear than awe.
In life, they had been powerful figures capable of standing alone, well aware of how immense the strength required to control wandering souls like themselves.
At the same time, the three Core Formation ghosts suspected that Mo Fan might be a demonic path cultivator from the Soul Refining Sect.
Manipulating souls was the Soul Refining Sect’s speciality.
Mo Fan offered no explanation, simply saying indifferently, “Tell me everything that happened here before, and how you died.”
“Yes!”
Under absolute control, the four ghosts could not refuse any of Mo Fan’s commands. Soon, they recounted everything they knew in detail.
At the same time, Mo Fan learned their in detail their names and backgrounds.
The human Core Formation ghosts were named: Ling Yunzi, Xu Lirong, and Zhang Haoran.
Among them, Ling Yunzi and Xu Lirong were fellow disciples, both from a second-grade sect in the divine domain called “Golden Light Sect”.
The entire Golden Light Sect, including the sect leader, had only four Core Formation cultivators. To compete for Dragon Ruins treasures, they sent the two to lead over thirty Foundation Establishment disciples here for training.
Unexpectedly, before the Dragon Ruins entrance even opened, the Golden Light Sect cultivators who entered this place were innocently caught in conflict and directly lost more than half their number.
Hearing this, Mo Fan could not help feeling a twinge of guilt and touching his nose.
Truth be told, this matter had started because of him. If he had not killed Yu Heng of Huang Xuan Valley, then schemed to make the island’s cultivators fight among themselves, these people might not have died so quickly.
Of course, even given another chance, Mo Fan would still do the same.
As the saying goes, better a dead fellow daoist than this poor daoist. Having survived in Black Wind Mountain for so long, Mo Fan had long mastered this principle and felt no psychological burden.
As for Zhang Haoran, he surprised Mo Fan somewhat. He was actually a loose cultivator with considerable talent.
Zhang Haoran had obtained entry qualification by snatching it from a second-grade sect. His cultivation was the strongest, retaining early Core Formation strength even as a ghost, comparable to Bai Jinghu.
Through Zhang Haoran’s words, Mo Fan gradually understood one thing: not all great teleportation arrays in every location could be entered and exited freely.
In many places in the divine domain, entering this space via great teleportation array required qualifications; otherwise, entry was impossible.
The three cultivators had all been killed in the first battle by Elder Yun Shan of Huang Xuan Valley.
They also told Mo Fan that this place originally had many wandering souls, but after subsequent battle shockwaves, more than half the cultivator souls were directly affected by violent energy and vanished from the world.
As for the demonic cultivator, named Lu Daxian, he was likewise a cultivator from some demon mountain in the divine domain.
This reminded Mo Fan of the Night Owl Demon King mentioned by Cang Gu earlier, who seemed to come from Wind Spirit Cave in the Hundred Yue Kingdom.
Thus, he asked curiously, “As far as I know, humans utterly detest demons. How did a Demon King like you establish a daoist ground in the divine domain?
Did no human powerhouses come to deal with you?”
This was something Mo Fan could not understand.
After all, the divine domain was human territory. Given the nature of those humans, he did not believe they would allow demonic cultivators to claim land on their turf, let alone a Demon King.
A Demon King’s value was self-evident, probably seen by humans as a humanoid great medicine.
“Master, you may not know, but in the divine domain, Demon Kings like me are born already controlled by human great powers.
They ignore us because our existence is more beneficial to them.
In other words, without the deterrence of demonic cultivators like us, on what grounds would those so-called righteous sects make the populace revere them?”
Lu Daxian smiled bitterly, then continued, “In truth, great demons like me are merely puppets of those major human sects!
Demon Kings like me are better off. With sufficiently high cultivation, we are no longer suitable for certain covert matters for fear of causing major destruction. Thus, we are instead sealed by those great powers as local mountain gods or water gods, enjoying relative leisure thereafter.
However, once becoming mountain or water gods, we are confined to our domains. Aside from participating in their designated special tasks, we cannot leave our sealed territories for life.
But those weaker minor demons suffer greatly. They are forced to plague human commoners, becoming training targets for disciples of those major sects, with no control over their own fates.”
