Yangzhou City, inside the City Lord’s Mansion Dungeon.
Gu Qingying suppressed her anger toward Gong Shangyu, focusing all her attention on the massive door before her.
The Silken Emotion Sword in her hand shimmered with purple light, each slash striking precisely at the weakest points of the seal, repeatedly producing muffled impacts.
Behind her, the children all held their breath, eyes wide with tension, not daring to make a sound.
“Rumble! Crack… Boom!”
With a sharp snap and a final thunderous roar, the door inscribed with eerie runes blocking their path was forcibly broken open by Gu Qingying!
Debris scattered as the dark, deep passage behind was revealed.
“Move quickly! Follow me!”
Gu Qingying issued a low command, her sharp purple eyes scanning both sides of the passage to ensure no danger lurked nearby.
Then she turned back and made a hand signal to the children, urging them to keep up.
Though terrified of Gu Qingying, the children’s survival instincts, their longing for home, and trust in her power gave them the courage to slip out of their cells one by one, closely following behind her.
Since there were many children, Gu Qingying divided them into groups, selecting the three children from the Dan Ding Pavilion’s guest noble families as group leaders to each take responsibility for a cluster.
After organizing the groups, Gu Qingying took a deep breath, her face alert as she cautiously led the way forward, quietly activating the cognition modification ability granted by the system.
[Ding! Cognition Modification Activated!]
At the crisp system prompt ringing in her ear, a faint mental ripple spread outward from her like waves of water, brushing over Gu Qingying and every child captured there.
This signaled that her cognition modification now encompassed all the children present, lowering their presence and making them undetectable to the patrolling cultist rebels.
“Stay close and keep as quiet as possible,”
Gu Qingying whispered, maintaining the presence-reducing effect within a limited range.
The children nodded in confused understanding, feeling an inexplicable sense of security near this fairy-like sister, instinctively following closely behind her, even softening their breathing.
The dim corridor was deathly silent, broken only by the faint footfalls and restrained breaths of Gu Qingying and the children.
After moving silently for a while, Gu Qingying’s unease grew stronger.
Normally, a place holding so many important sacrifices wouldn’t be so eerily empty and quiet, even if not heavily guarded.
Suppressing her doubts, she led the children carefully along the winding passage.
Yet even after leaving the prison area’s corridor, they encountered no guards whatsoever!
Seeing this, Gu Qingying’s suspicion deepened.
Not a single guard had appeared all along the way.
The empty rooms around still bore clear signs of the Yin Corpse Sect’s disciples practicing corpse forging and living there, but now they were completely vacant.
The entire dungeon seemed abandoned, with only Gu Qingying’s group moving stealthily within.
Hmm?
What’s going on?
Where did everyone go?
Is this a trap?
Or… has something else happened?
Her unease mounting, Gu Qingying seized the opportunity presented by this strange silence to speed up.
She continuously sent out Divine Sense, carefully discerning the path, moving toward what seemed like an exit.
Finally, after ascending a long staircase made of massive bluestone slabs,
a faint light appeared ahead, accompanied by a flow of fresh air.
It looked like an exit—or a passage connecting to another building.
Gu Qingying stopped, signaling the children to remain silent as she drew near the light, sword in hand, holding her breath to carefully examine the path ahead.
She stepped out first into what appeared to be a plaza used by the Yin Corpse Sect for some sort of ritual.
The vast underground space was utterly silent, no movement visible except for Gu Qingying and the children.
Frowning, Gu Qingying found the scene increasingly strange.
Hmm?
Could it be… completely unguarded here?
Were the cultist rebels truly this careless?
Or had they never expected anyone to escape…
Or perhaps something more urgent demanded their attention, leaving these children neglected…
As she considered this, she gestured for the children to follow and scrutinized the whitebone altar at the plaza’s center.
Though intimidating at first glance—a desecrated construct piled with countless bones of slaughtered commoners—
Gu Qingying’s experience from her past life’s countless clashes with cultist rebels during the Demonic Realm War allowed her to see through the façade at once.
This altar was just a showpiece.
Most of the bones were animal remains, and even the few human bones were clearly taken from exhumed corpses, not freshly harvested from the living.
A mere glance at the breaks in the bones atop the altar revealed the truth.
If bones were taken from living people, the fracture ends would show bruises or blood clots.
Bones extracted from corpses dead for days lacked such signs.
“Hm? What exactly are these cultists up to?”
Perplexed, Gu Qingying’s two lifetimes of memory made it hard to understand the Yin Corpse Sect’s methods.
Demonic rituals relied on living souls.
The more the soul suffered, the more powerful the desecration’s effect on the cult.
Yet the cultists here seemed cheap and half-hearted—using livestock bones for the altar and stolen corpses for sacrifice.
While the Yin Corpse Sect was notorious for corpse manipulation, their usual cruelty involved turning living people into Living Corpses—ferocious undead—not just messing with old corpses.
And looking at the formation’s setup around the altar, Gu Qingying was more confused than ever.
They were extracting corpse energy for cultivation using Earth Fiend Power combined with these stolen corpses—completely pointless!
When did the Yin Corpse Sect become so stingy?
Their usual method was straightforward—turn the whole city’s populace into Living Corpses with formations, have the undead devour each other, then refine a Corpse King through Gu Cultivation to extract massive corpse energy.
“When did the Yin Corpse Sect switch tactics—stop using living people and start grave robbing?”
Pondering deeper, Gu Qingying suddenly understood why the cultists had kidnapped so many children with the Four Yin Fate Patterns.
This formation caused massive disturbances; only children with Four Yin Fate Patterns could balance the formation and mask the abnormal phenomena of the Fiend Gathering Formation’s activation.
“Uh… are these guys really even cultists?”
Scratching her head, Gu Qingying muttered to herself, feeling increasingly unsettled.
If these were true cultists,
their setup would be laughed to death by any serious demonic faction.
But if they weren’t cultists, then what they’d created was undeniably within the demonic system.
Even without using living people to forge corpses, kidnapping children, or grave robbing, their actions were still despicable.
In the end, Gu Qingying could only shake her head and mutter with a weird expression,
“Hm… these guys do have some moral boundaries, but those boundaries aren’t very broad…”