Upon returning to the Yan River, Tang Jie entered the remains of his original body to cultivate.
He had richly profited from this trip. Not only had he gotten the Soul Bewitching Grass, he had also killed several hundred resentful souls, absorbing their Soul Fire. This had both increased the purity of his life force and also increased the speed at which he absorbed the original body’s power. But these two harvests put together didn’t compare to the third, which was that he had comprehended a punch that could obliterate resentful souls.
Through all those countless punches, Tang Jie had thoroughly comprehended the process.
That punch could have such an effect not only because of Tang Jie’s surging blood energy, but also because it had merged with some of the Sun Wheel Sign’s power!
Yes, body and art had merged!
How this had happened required some detailed explanation.
There were actually levels to this kind of fusion.
The first level was the simplest: a body cultivator and a law cultivator attacking together could be considered a fusion, though strictly speaking, it was more like collaboration.
The second level was to cultivate both laws and body, like Peng Yaolong or Wang Juemie. The defining aspect of this level was that the cultivator had the strong body of a body cultivator and the myriad spell arts of a law cultivator. But body and arts still remained separate.
Still, this alone was enough to make Tang Jie terrifyingly strong, letting him accomplish the miracles of defeating Violet Palace True Lords at Soul Transformation and defeating Earth Immortals at Soul Projection.
Now, there was a fourth level.
Tang Jie’s reborn original body no longer had just a simple stacking of body cultivation and law cultivation.
It was because his body was unique, a true perfect body that cultivated both law and body.
It was not the fake body cultivation of Peng Yaolong and Wang Juemie, which was still law cultivation at its core.
Every cell of his body contained astounding amounts of energy, blood and spirit mixed together and available for him to use.
His punch that could annihilate resentful souls was actually a fusion of the Sun Wheel Sign and his blood energy.
The power that punch took was only a hundredth of the Sun Wheel Sign’s.
But this little bit of energy had created a qualitative transformation to Tang Jie’s punch.
This was a true fusion of arts and body, going from addition to multiplication.
This was the true meaning of the perfect body!
This discovery was stunning for Tang Jie. He had never imagined that he would be able to reach this state. It was because of this fusion of the Sun Wheel Sign and his blood energy that he had been able to kill so many resentful souls at once.
Of course, it was a technique created in haste, and there was still a lot of room for improvement.
Tang Jie stopped hesitating and began to research this topic. Back in the mortal plane, Tang Jie’s avatar also began to use the Dao of Wisdom to analyze the spell arts of the world, merging them with blood energy to see which combinations were the most effective against ghosts.
This ended up going on for three months.
In these three months, neither the original body nor the avatar left their posts, busy with their research. Thus, Tang Jie didn’t know that not long after he left the wasteland, a ghost army arrived, led by a Yaksha.
Alas, the ghost army searched the wasteland for more than half a month but found no more signs of that living being.
Maraju couldn’t do anything about this, but he was also unwilling to accept failure, so he left behind a ghost general and departed.
Meanwhile, Tang Jie continued his research.
After three months of effort, he finally managed to produce a seal art.
There were 1436 kinds of evil-countering spell arts put together and merged together with blood energy in this seal art. It could manifest righteous energy to suppress all filthy and evil existences, particularly ghosts, so he called it the Evil Punishing Seal.
There were nine forms to the Evil Punishing Seal, each of which was extremely powerful and could subdue ten thousand ghosts at full power.
Alas, Tang Jie’s new body had limited strength and could only kill a hundred ghosts with the first form.
Even so, Tang Jie was much stronger than before.
Tang Jie called Little Three over and said, “Little Three, come and test the power of this move.”
He formed a hand sign and then thrust a hand at the air like he was trying to seize the clouds, and an energy surged out of him.
This energy made Little Three shiver, and he felt a keen sensation of danger.
As a ghost, he was extremely sensitive to this evil-punishing power.
Tang Jie smiled in satisfaction. “Be careful.”
He thrust his palm at Little Three.
While Little Three had already sensed danger from this palm, he was still confident in his strength and chose to meet it directly. But as his hand met Tang Jie’s hand, Little Three felt a scalding power running through him, so instinctively jumped through space to evade.
A fissure appeared above Tang Jie, and Little Three hopped out, looking at Tang Jie in confusion. He was clearly wondering how Tang Jie had become so powerful.
While Tang Jie hadn’t been able to do much damage to Little Three, he was happy enough to trigger that reaction. After all, Little Three’s cultivation was on par with peak Soul Transformation, and his actual strength was much stronger than Soul Transformation. Tang Jie was currently much weaker than him.
But Tang Jie still felt like he hadn’t had his fill.
With a new trick up his sleeve, he wanted to test it out some more, like a child with a new toy. Thus, he left the Yan River and headed toward the wasteland.
He soon arrived and saw resentful souls floating here and there.
Tang Jie began to release his vitality.
This was essentially kicking a beehive, and countless resentful souls rushed at him, the howling of wind and the shrieking of ghosts filling the air.
Tang Jie was unafraid, and as the resentful souls gathered, he muttered, “Hundred Ghost… Slaughter!”
He formed hand signs, and a crimson sun emerged from behind Tang Jie’s head, exuding grandiose energy.
Tang Jie punched, unleashing a flood of righteous energy that instantly swept away a great swath of resentful souls.
Tang Jie unleashed another Hundred Ghost Slaughter, blasting out waves of righteous energy that exterminated all ghosts they came into contact with, even dispelling the obscuring black fog, creating a patch of clear sky in the eternally gloomy Nether Domain.
Although this clear patch of sky lasted for only a brief moment, in that moment, there was light in the underworld.
And as Tang Jie punched and punched, this light appeared again and again.
The resentful souls died in great numbers.
It was even more violent, stunning, and terrifying than the massacre from three months ago.
The resentful souls disappeared on contact with the punches, without even time to react.
Tang Jie kept punching until he could no longer see any resentful souls in the wasteland.
The wasteland had been utterly purged of ghosts.
Even the smell of decay had been cleaned up.
As Tang Jie gazed at his handiwork, he absorbed the Life energy filling the world and immersed himself in a sense of immense self-satisfaction.
Surprisingly, the Soul Fire gathered together and began to fall down as rain.
This was extremely condensed Life energy, so Tang Jie immediately began to gather it up.
There were twelve drops in all, and they spun around in Tang Jie’s hand before gathering into one large drop of Life essence.
Tang Jie drank this drop of Life essence down, upon which the Life energy rushed through him, giving him what felt like an inexhaustible reserve of power.
But Tang Jie quickly started to feel full, and he knew that his body currently couldn’t completely absorb this drop. Thus, he opened up his mouth and spat out the drop of Life essence, sealing it away for future use.
Having tested the Hundred Ghost Slaughter and been satisfied with its power, he prepared to leave, but at this moment, he saw a group flying over.
There had just been a battle here, and the Hundred Ghost Slaughter was quite a flashy move, so it wasn’t strange for ghosts to be drawn over.
Tang Jie was going to ignore this and leave, but he noticed that something was wrong. This group of ghosts was organized into ranks and seemed intent on stopping him. Its leader was even wearing armor and holding a hammer of bone.
Upon seeing Tang Jie, he was delighted rather than surprised, shouting, “Finally found you, human! This is the underworld, and no living beings call it ‘home’. Come with me at once to the Nether city!”
He waved his hand, and a ghost servant charged out from his left and right, throwing the chains in their hands at Tang Jie.
These chains extended in the air and began to chase after Tang Jie.
Tang Jie simply raised an eyebrow. “A Nether city? You are ghost servants of a Nether city? So is there one nearby?”
As he spoke, he flicked his finger, knocking back the chains.