As the group made its way up the mountain path, there was no sound except the crunching of gravel beneath their feet.
Tang Jie ordered the ghosts to lead the way, but when they reached the fog, the ghosts seemed to sense the terror within and refused to go forward.
Tang Jie’s eyes coldly glinted. “Those who don’t advance will die right here!”
He thrust out the fork, slaying one of the retreating ghost soldiers.
With no other choice, the ghost soldiers entered the fog, all of them fighting to be last.
Meanwhile, Tang Jie was missing those mindless ghosts of the wilds, who at least didn’t know fear, unlike these ghosts. While he had spent so much time collecting them precisely because they had intelligence, that also meant that they understood how to be cowards.
It was no wonder low-level ghost soldiers only needed to obey simple orders. Truly, the less they knew, the better.
As they went deeper and deeper, the air of the mountain grew more and more threatening.
The ghosts began to wail in fright, their cries resounding over the mountain.
The shrieking winds and wailing of ghosts were even starting to creep Tang Jie out.
But he knew that the real terror was still to come.
A gust of wind kicked up black fog and gravel, which struck the several ghost soldiers in the front. There was a rustling, and then the ghosts began to howl in pain as if they were being devoured.
Their bodies quickly melted away, just as he had seen before.
The remaining ghost soldiers backed away in shock, but Tang Jie said, “What are you afraid of? It’s nothing but a group of Souleater Bugs.”
While the Nether Domain was a world of ghosts, there were existences besides ghosts, just like how the mortal plane had creatures besides humans.
Souleater Bugs were an extremely small bug of the Nether Domain, almost invisible to the naked eye. They were born with the ability to devour souls and could penetrate through the surfaces of ghosts and devour them for sustenance. This was why those ghosts had died in such a bizarre way. Soul Fire was the core of a ghost’s existence, and to be bereft of Soul Fire was like a human lacking a skeleton. It was only natural that they would fall apart.
It was the natural bane of ghosts, and unless a ghost had reached a certain level of cultivation where the soul was sufficiently tough, it was hard to resist their encroachment.
But these insects feared blood energy that was abundant with life force. This was why the ghost soldier he had protected with his blood had been able to go in so deep.
As Tang Jie spoke, he thrust out a palm.
It seemed like an ordinary strike, but the center of his palm contained a drop of blood. This blood was scattered by the palm blast, manipulated by his energy into a crimson hand that struck the remains of the ghost soldiers. A cry erupted from the dissolving ghost corpses, containing all kinds of pitches and tones. Countless faces floated up into the air—old and young, men and women, all of them in pain. After a few moments, they disappeared.
But Tang Jie continued to maintain the hand, and as the blood energy spread out, the cries dwindled away. The Souleater Bugs had all been obliterated by Tang Jie’s crimson hand.
In the remains were several twinkling motes of starlight.
This was the essence refined by the Souleater Bugs as they devoured souls, and it was called Starsoul Dust. It was an extremely rare treasure that could strengthen the soul or body and also repair damage to the soul. It only appeared when Souleater Bugs had consumed large numbers of souls.
Usually, Starsoul Dust was calculated by the grain, and Tang Jie had gotten several large chunks with one strike. Thus, it wasn’t that the Nether Domain didn’t have resources, only that they were found in a different form.
Tang Jie gathered up the Starsoul Dust and said, “Let’s go.”
As they advanced, they encountered several more clouds of Souleater Bugs, but all of them were taken down by Tang Jie’s crimson hand. Each time, he would collect some more Starsoul Dust, gathering up these rare treasures like they were rocks he was finding on the road.
Only after he had gathered around a hundred did the Souleater Bugs finally stop appearing.
A withered forest appeared before them.
All the trees here were dried up and lifeless, a drab grayness shrouding everything.
The last ghost soldier Tang Jie had sent had vanished here.
This meant that the danger here could not be countered by blood energy.
But Tang Jie didn’t care, ordering his ghosts into the forest.
Several resentful souls floated at the front. Suddenly, a withered branch erupted out of the earth and whipped a resentful soul. Even though resentful souls were aggregations of evil energies, it still shrieked in pain upon being whipped by the branch, its ethereal body unable to stop the blow. The branch then curled around the resentful soul and dragged it toward the ground, which opened up like a giant maw and swallowed the ghost whole.
The shrieking stopped.
“A Grave Ent,” Tang Jie muttered.
The last ghost soldier he had sent had fallen to this Grave Ent, and Tang Jie was ready to deal with it.
He threw out a blast of flame.
While Grave Ents were strong, they had a natural fear of flames. It was just that flames were a rarity in the Nether Domain, so it had few natural enemies. It was just its rotten luck that it had run into Tang Jie.
The Grave Ent screeched as the flames scorched it. Numerous roots rose out of the ground as the Grave Ent stood up and charged at Tang Jie, a furious face on its trunk. But this flame was particularly fierce, and the Grave Ent was ash before it could reach him.
Alas, the Grave Ent didn’t leave anything behind.
Tang Jie proceeded forward, burning aside all opposition.
In truth, Yakshas, with their powerful bodies, had never been known for learning flame spells. But the ghosts were of low intelligence, and while their instinct to survive made them know fear, their limited intelligence didn’t offer much else. As for those two ghost generals, they were smart enough to have realized something, but for the same reason, they pretended not to know. In addition, Tang Jie had already decided that none of these ghost soldiers would be leaving this mountain alive, and as for those two ghost generals, he would be taking their Life Flames, so he wasn’t worried about them revealing anything.
Eventually, there were so many Grave Ents that Tang Jie had no choice but to burn a path through.
Fortunately, his perfect body was both physically strong and bursting with spiritual energy, enough to support this level of consumption.
As he was doing this, a gray light suddenly shot toward him.
Tang Jie immediately evaded and fired a flame at the gray figure. But the gray figure passed through the flame unaffected and struck a ghost, piercing straight through it. The ghost wailed and quickly withered away, ultimately disappearing into smoke.
As the ghost disappeared, the gray streak revealed itself to be a small snake.
“A Hellash Snake,” Tang Jie said.
Like the Souleater Bugs, the Hellash Snake was a Nether Domain fiend snake that fed on ghosts, naturally countering them.
Their gray-white bodies were indistinguishable from withered branches as they lay upon them, but when they moved, they were as quick as lightning. Any ghosts bitten by them would quickly decay and disappear.
Upon seeing the Hellash Snake, Tang Jie fired off a bolt of condensed water.
This water bolt was an ordinary spell that even a Spirit Disciple could use, but when it struck, the snake immediately began to give off white smoke as if it had been burned. The snake hissed and began to flail around as if it had come into contact with some lethal poison.
It was afraid of water!
The Hellash Snake twisted a few times before falling to the ground, giving off white smoke. Its insides had already been liquefied, leaving behind only its skin.
This skin was extremely valuable. Unlike the Starsoul Dust, which nurtured the Divine Soul, this was a powerful soul poison that would work wonders on one’s enemies.
Tang Jie put away the skin and continued forward.
There were many Hellash Snakes in this forest of Grave Ents. Giving off no energy and camouflaged in the branches of the Grave Ents, they were extremely hard to discover and devilishly fast. Thus, even though Tang Jie knew how to counter them, he still lost quite a few ghosts.
By the time he got out of the Grave Ent forest, he had lost a fourth of the ghosts he had brought and had gained sixty-some snakeskins in exchange.
Beyond the Grave Ent forest was a forest of stones.
He ordered the ghosts forward.
Things were much simpler here, as the stones immediately began to move, revealing themselves to be stone monsters. But these stone monsters gave off faint blue lights, which were actually ghost flames. In other words, they could be described as some ghost–monster hybrid.
“Netherite monsters,” Tang Jie muttered.
These were stone monsters that had been born from Netherite, a unique stone of the Nether Domain, which made them an extremely rare kind of monster. Because of their Soul Fire, they were harder to deal with than stone monsters of the mortal plane. Most importantly, it was much easier for them to come into being.
The stone monsters charged at Tang Jie en masse.
There was no special way of countering them, only pulverizing their bodies and extinguishing the Soul Fire within, so Tang Jie ordered the ghosts into battle. These Netherite monsters were too tough and strong for Tang Jie to defeat alone, so it was a good thing he had all those ghost soldiers as well as Saros and two ghost generals.
After a fierce battle, the Netherite monsters were slain.
But Tang Jie had less than half of his ghost soldiers left.
Tang Jie didn’t mind this at all, because the presence of the Hellash Snakes and the Netherite Monsters had eliminated one of the three remaining possibilities, and Tang Jie was more confident about what was waiting for him in the mountain.
Among the rubble of the Netherite monsters were several crystalline chunks.
Tang Jie picked them up and looked them over. “Stone marrow?”
This substance was stone marrow, but for some reason, it had solidified into these numerous chunks. Tang Jie guessed that this stone marrow had been mutated somehow, but he couldn’t determine its use solely based on the information at hand. All he could sense was that this substance was thick with Life energy as well as Earth Element energy.
He put it away so that he could take his time researching it later.
He was getting closer and closer to the summit.
The fog was getting thicker and thicker, forming a massive cloud.
Tang Jie stood in front of the cloud and began to mutter.
“This is the final test. It’s time to see whether this is the Two Life Flower or the Spirit Communion Grass!”
He strode into the cloud.