The Undying Immortal System

Chapter 479 – Life 120, Age 58, Martial Lord Peak

In theory, identifying a body cultivator was simple. All one had to do was examine a person’s body and determine whether it contained elevated levels of wu.

In practice, however, matters were a bit more complicated.

With energy vision, I could identify body cultivators at a glance. Their flesh and bones all carried the telltale signs of accumulated wu. Unfortunately, the majority of our sect only possessed an underdeveloped version of qi vision. They could tell when a person’s body contained abnormal energies, but they couldn’t distinguish between body cultivation, toxins from low-purity pills, and the lingering corruption of an attack from a demonic beast.

This level of uncertainty was unacceptable. If we were going to start banishing and killing people, we needed a foolproof method for detecting body cultivators that didn’t rely on me personally checking every suspicious individual.

The first solution I devised was crude, but effective: the Wu-Binding Pill.

This pill could be fed to anyone suspected of being a body cultivator. When ingested by a normal person, the pill had zero effect. When ingested by a body cultivator, however, the medicinal energy would bind to their wu, creating a deadly toxin. The stronger the body cultivator, the more violent the reaction.

However, while effective, the lethality of this pill meant that we wouldn’t be able to interrogate those we captured. Also, several of the herbs needed to concoct this pill could only be grown in specific, harsh environments, so producing enough for us to test every hunter and merchant guard was impossible.

We needed a method that was cheap, reliable, and reusable. We needed a formation.

While I didn’t know of any formations designed specifically for detecting body cultivators, one of the basic formations used by herbalists allowed them to monitor the balance of qi and wu within their fields. This felt like something I might be able to repurpose. The only problem was that a body cultivator’s wu was sealed within their bones and muscles. It didn’t float around freely through the environment.

Finding a solution to this problem didn’t actually prove too difficult. It took me less than two days to create a formation that could reliably detect body cultivators. However, this formation was cobbled together from dozens of inscriptions, making it both finicky and needlessly complex. Simplifying this formation took me another two months.

During this time, the situation in our outer kingdoms continued to deteriorate. I could only hope that, with this new formation in hand, our people would be able to turn things around.

Upon being presented with the simplified Rank 1 diagram that I had come up with, the Elder Council immediately ordered our specialists to begin producing formation plates as fast as they could.

The next day, small guard detachments began appearing around a few of our innermost cities, testing passersby with the formations. A week later, bundles of formation plates were distributed to every city under our control.

Each city recruited a contingent of guards from among the various clans that had pledged fealty to us. These guards were then equipped with formation plates and sent out into the countryside to search for spies and saboteurs.

These guardsmen were all reasonably talented Masters and Grandmasters, but I didn’t truly expect them to accomplish much. At best, I thought the new formations might make our enemies more cautious. Given that Jon had access to some type of information blessing, I was expecting him to withdraw his troops before the first guards even left their cities.

However, as orders were passed from city to city and the guard forces began testing merchants, hunters, and itinerant cultivators, there was no noticeable drop in either suspicious movements or attacks on our fields. Then, the reports started coming in.

The first captives were taken outside a small herb-producing town in the South Kingdom. The second group was caught on a forest road between two cities in the North Kingdom. Then, more were discovered hiding among merchant escorts, migrant laborers, and hunting parties. One after another, our people began identifying and arresting enemy soldiers.

Individually, these infiltrators were far stronger than the guards sent to apprehend them, but Jon had scattered his people into small groups. Faced with coordinated forces several times their size, they were dragged down through sheer numbers.

This success should have been encouraging. Instead, it created a fresh headache. What were we supposed to do with all of these prisoners?

Killing them outright would have been simple, but how many were we willing to execute? Hundreds? Thousands? Killing enemies on the battlefield was one thing. Slaughtering helpless prisoners was another.

As more prisoners were captured, a debate over how to deal with them broke out within the halls of the Elder Council. I, meanwhile, went down to one of the holding cells to see what I could learn for myself.

Contrary to my expectations, the young man I chose to interrogate proved rather forthcoming.

“The General told us to answer all your questions,” he said with an innocent smile. “So, what is it you want to know?”

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Given this opening, I had to ask the obvious question. “Who is the General?”

He shrugged. “I don’t rightly know his name. He’s just the General.”

“Describe him, then.”

The prisoner looked me up and down, as though comparing the two of us. “A little shorter than you, I guess. Black hair, black eyes, tan skin. A full-blooded human, you know? Not one of them half-breeds. His eyes are sharp, though. Looks like he’s always thinking. Like he’s always got a plan.”

That didn’t narrow things down much. There were plenty of relatively short men in the world. Still, at least it confirmed that our target was male.

“What clan is your General from? Is he from one of the domain’s major families?”

The prisoner smiled and shook his head. “I don’t rightly know.”

I continued questioning him, but every answer was the same. Either he genuinely didn’t know, or his responses were so vague as to be useless. I wanted to press harder, but it quickly became clear that this particular prisoner simply didn’t possess the information I needed. In the end, I could only have him taken away.

I questioned several more of the captured soldiers, but their answers followed the same pattern. They all answered to “the General,” yet none of them could tell me who he was. Their ultimate leader was supposedly the Demon King, but even there the details became muddy. Some thought the General served the Demon King. Others believed the General and the Demon King were one and the same. None of them spoke with enough certainty to be trusted.

This left us with a growing number of prisoners and no clear way to make use of them. We could keep them locked up, but to what end? Was it really worth maintaining prisoners in the middle of a war?

I was hoping that apprehending so many soldiers would lead to a boost in our production of karmic energy, but that didn’t happen. Attacks on our fields slowed, and our herb supply stabilized, but our karmic energy production continued to decline. A few cities in the North Kingdom had even stopped producing karmic energy altogether, which suggested that the people there no longer recognized our sect’s representative as their City Lord.

Kan was off trying to deal with this, so I called on JiuLi to get a better understanding of what was happening.

She looked at me with weary eyes. “Once it was determined that no more useful information could be extracted from our prisoners, the Council decided to execute them. Publicly. In the center of the cities where they were captured.”

I nodded, having expected this outcome.

“What they failed to consider was that these soldiers weren’t just posing as locals. They were locals. They were locals who had been drafted by the Li Clan several years ago. Locals who had only recently returned home. And our people slaughtered them for it.”

Sadly, this outcome was unavoidable. We were occupying enemy territory, so killing enemy combatants sometimes meant killing the sons and daughters of our new civilians. Usually, though, this wouldn’t be much of an issue. The people of this world were well acquainted with the grim realities of war.

“After the executions, various groups began stirring up the populace against us. They tied together resentment over being confined to their cities, anger at the heavy surveillance, frustration over the lack of herbs for cultivation, and grief over the deaths of their kinsmen. At first, these groups moved cautiously, but when no one from the City Lord’s Mansion stepped in to suppress them, they grew bolder and began openly calling for the invading army to be driven out.”

I blinked at JiuLi, shocked. “Are you serious? They’re inciting the mortals to revolt? Are they crazy?”

Mortals were generally considered off-limits. They did not take part in wars. They simply accepted whichever side conquered their city. They were more like resources to be utilized than people to be won over.

Turning the mortals against us was worse than salting the fields. If the mortals turned into a mob, we wouldn’t have any choice but to put them down, and if things got out of control, the cities we were occupying would cease to exist.

“Kan’s trying to take a diplomatic approach. He’s already sent people to negotiate with the largest groups of insurgents. Suba HaoRong, though…”

JiuLi paused and took a long breath before continuing. “HaoRong has turned his East Kingdom into little more than a prison camp, with all the cities firmly under the control of his Law Enforcement Hall. This has fixed his issues with karmic energy, but I’m worried. The East Kingdom is becoming isolated from the rest of our territories, and the rift within the Elder Council is only growing wider. If this continues…”

Listening to JiuLi’s words, my eyes lost focus, and I began staring off into nothingness.

I had originally thought this war was helping us, allowing our sect to push through the Ruler Tier without needing to worry about the Bureau’s rules. However, this rapid expansion had exposed far too many cracks in our foundation. If this continued, we would rip ourselves apart, destroying everything that I had been trying to build.

We needed time to settle down and regroup. We needed to be done with these external worries so we could focus on healing our internal wounds.

We had been trying to get rid of our external worries, though, but every attempt had only weakened us further. Our armies could easily win a direct battle, yet our enemies never gave us one. I could personally use wide-scale soul attacks to annihilate several legions, but they always avoided me. Our opponents hid in the shadows and moved only when they possessed an absolute advantage.

How were we supposed to defeat such an enemy? How could we defeat them quickly so that we could get back to building our sect?

Against a normal enemy, our only option might have been to retreat back to the Heroes Domain. Jon, however, was different. His blessing revolved around challenges. He wanted people to challenge him, because once challenged, his blessing would grant him a boon to help him emerge victorious.

This blessing wasn’t omnipotent, though. I had already defeated it twice.

If I challenged Jon to a fight, he might gain a boost to both his soul and cultivation base, but this boost would have its limits. I wasn’t entirely sure how powerful my soul truly was, but I was certain that I could take out a Martial Spirit if needed, possibly even an Ancestor. Jon was less than 60 years old. Even with a boost from his blessing, could he really gain enough power to withstand this kind of attack?

Making up my mind, I stood and walked down to the dungeons, where I found the first prisoner that I had interrogated.

“You are to be set free. Go back to your General and send him a message.” I paused, closing my eyes. “Tell him, I challenge the Demon King to a contest of champions. Let us decide this in the arena.”

As the prisoner departed, I considered using a soul technique that would let me track him and eavesdrop on his surroundings. However, considering that our enemies possessed some form of information blessing, I decided against this. I wanted the prisoner to deliver my message, and attaching such a technique to him might have caused his allies to either avoid or kill him.

Three days later, a messenger arrived, bearing a letter from the Demon King. It contained only two words. The moment I read them, my heart sank.

Challenge Rejected.