Yellow Skinned Taoist Master

Chapter 60: Kill Kill Kill — Slay Slay Slay

The brass oil lamp was not hallucinating.

It had genuinely witnessed, with its own eyes, Guanzhu — now sporting two heads — get knocked out cold by a pill.

Before Guanzhu went mad, he had worn a robe of deep blue-black.

After the madness took hold, the robe had split into three colors: purple, white, and cyan.

Now all three colors were intertwined across his robe, tangled and bleeding together — like great buckets of dye hurled into water. Vivid and dazzling, yet suffused with an eerie chill.

Not just the lamp — Chen Huangpi had seen it too.

Song Qiuyue and the other cultivators had seen it.

The deities had seen it.

They had all watched that terrifying old Daoist priest go stiff, kick out both legs, and crash flat on his back to the ground.

Not only had his breathing stopped.Even his heartbeat was gone.

In the heart of everyone present, a certain unnamed thought began to stir.

"Go!"

"Move — now!"

Song Qiuyue and the other cultivators didn't hesitate for a single moment — they shot into the air and began to flee.

But the very next instant, a dense web of sword qi slammed down above their heads, blocking every escape.

"Where do you think you're going?"

Chen Huangpi said coldly: "My two mountains of copper coins haven't been delivered yet. You think you can just leave?"

"You think you can stop us?"

Song Qiuyue's face was glacial, her eyes filled with killing intent.

The rest of the cultivators were the same.

Every one of them was a Nascent Soul cultivator. Chen Huangpi was just one person — and the forty deities, though nearly drained of their incense power, still had a thin thread of strength left.

The old Daoist priest had suddenly collapsed like this — any clear-eyed person could see that something had gone wrong with him.

If they didn't seize this opportunity to flee the Hundred Thousand Mountains and make it back to Xu Province city — when the old Daoist priest recovered, not one of them would survive.

And this wretched little brat.

He actually dared to block them.

He was asking to die.

Chen Huangpi said with sudden clarity: "So you were never actually going to pay me, were you?"

"Shut your mouth!"

Song Qiuyue's forty deities materialized as faint divine figures behind her. The cultivators fell in behind her, surrounding Chen Huangpi on all sides.

"You are beyond foolish!"

"Mountains of gold and silver — and you refused them. All you asked for were two mountains of copper coins."

"Is this lady's life worth so little?!"

Song Qiuyue pressed forward, teeth clenched: "You have no vision whatsoever! This lady offered herself to you — you should have been overcome with joy, treating this lady as the most precious treasure in the world! Instead — what did you do?"

"You cut off both of this lady's hands!"

"You weren't even remotely interested in this lady's body!"

"What exactly do you think of Song Qiuyue?!"

"I am of the Song family of—"

She never got to finish.

Chen Huangpi extended two fingers — and a blade of sword qi, sharp beyond measure, something that felt capable of severing all things, sliced clean through Song Qiuyue.

The next instant.

Blood sprayed a full several meters into the air.

A head rolled to Chen Huangpi's feet.

Song Qiuyue's beautiful face was frozen in utter disbelief.

If Chen Huangpi had looked down, he might have seen that her lips were still moving — as if trying to say something.

But he didn't glance at her at all.

A soul plunged directly into the Soul-Hooking Register.

"You—"

Zhao Hai went pale and exploded in fury: "You dared to kill—"

Pfft.

Another blade of sword qi flashed through.

He was split cleanly in two on the spot.

Another soul was claimed by the Soul-Hooking Register.

The cultivators collectively froze in horror.

Only now did they understand: this boy, whom they had dismissed as a half-grown brat who could only strut about because of that terrifying old Daoist priest — his true power was something even more frightening than a Nascent Soul cultivator.

"No — that's impossible!"

"The Nascent Soul is the end of the road for cultivation!"

"No matter how talented you are, you should be no different from us — so how can you be this terrifying?!"

"You're not a cultivator — you're an evil spirit!"

That was the only explanation they could reach.

But Chen Huangpi had absolutely no interest in arguing with them.

If they weren't going to pay — then they could pay with their lives.

A'Gui had done great service, and right now it lay in a deep, injured sleep. It needed souls to recover.

"Deities — strike down this fiend!"

Someone bellowed the command.

The forty deities, at this point, were very nearly at the end of their rope.

They were deities — but before the Song family, they were nothing more than servants to be summoned and dismissed at will.

Put plainly: they had been permitted to become deities by the Governor of Xu Province himself.

And now Chen Huangpi had killed Song Qiuyue right in front of them — killed a daughter of a great noble house as casually as killing a chicken.

If they didn't kill Chen Huangpi in return, then when they got back to Xu Province city, they would be wiped from existence anyway.

"Open your hearts to us!"

One of the deities — massive in build, wielding a three-pronged halberd, with two extra eyes across the top of its brow — inhaled sharply at the cultivators.

Human qi, thread by thread, was drawn out of them.

In the cultivators' bodies, that human qi was merely the energy of their Nascent Soul cultivation.

In a deity's hands, it became sacred incense power and divine might.

The other deities did the same. In an instant, the cultivators were sucked down to nothing but skin and bone.

"Attack!"

The deity with the three-pronged halberd revealed its true form. Four eyes blazed with grey light.

Chen Huangpi suddenly felt he could not move a step — as if that grey light had bound him in place.

Then the halberd in the deity's hand, surging with divine power, began to grow against the wind, swelling in moments into a blade massive enough to split the heavens and cleave the earth.

The three-pronged halberd was loaded with a terrifying force — something like an exerted will, and something like the sword intent of the Grand Duke Demon Slaying technique, carrying its drives to purge evil, slay demons, and annihilate darkness. There was no evading it. Nor any need to.

That force carried a will of its own — eyes locked on, and no matter how one fled or twisted, the halberd would strike.

Chen Huangpi didn't dodge. He simply raised his head with curiosity, feeling the deity's peculiar power.

BOOM.

The massive blade came crashing down straight onto Chen Huangpi's head.

DONG!

A dull, metallic clang rang out — like iron striking iron.

The deity's eyes went wide in disbelief.

The three-pronged halberd in its hands shattered on the spot.

Chen Huangpi, meanwhile, didn't lose a single hair.

"Even the most terrifying evil spirit couldn't come through that completely unscathed!"

At those words, Chen Huangpi rubbed his head and said: "It did hurt, just a tiny tiny tiny bit. Actually, I lied — maybe if you were ten times stronger, you might have made me feel just a tiny tiny tiny bit of pain."

"AAARGH!"

The deity flew into a frenzy and drove its fist straight at Chen Huangpi's head.

Goaded and enraged, it struck with the full force of its divine might unleashed.

But Chen Huangpi had no patience for this game.

He extended two fingers.

The essence energy from his kidneys was drawn out in a steady, endless stream.

A blade of sword qi, several times larger than the deity itself, came crashing down.

The deity's fist hadn't even landed.

It was reduced to scattered dust by the sword qi.

The brass oil lamp watched from the side with cold amusement.

From the moment these people had started forming their ill intentions, it had known they were going to make a move against Chen Huangpi.

And that they were not long from death.

Nascent Soul cultivators? Forty deities nearly drained dry by Guanzhu?

First Master had been refining Chen Huangpi with true fire for years — and never singed a single hair.

Second Master's teeth could bite visible marks into the lamp's own body — but couldn't pierce Chen Huangpi's skin.

And they thought they could kill him?

Absolutely laughable.

"Scatter — every man for himself!!"

The remaining deities all roared at once and scattered in every direction.

Their incense was nearly gone, their powers thin. Seeing no way to harm Chen Huangpi, there was no reason to linger any longer. Even a lifetime as a fugitive hunted by the Song family was better than dying here right now.

But could they run?

"Huang Er!"

"I know."

The brass oil lamp grinned and breathed out stream after stream of true fire.

The fire wove together into a blazing net.

Every fleeing deity slammed to a halt in front of it — like birds caught in a wall of flame.

Sword qi ripped through the air.

Chen Huangpi's face turned cold with killing intent, and he unleashed his Grand Duke Demon Slaying sword qi in wave after relentless wave.

Wherever the sword qi passed, deities screamed and wailed — and pile after pile of yellow earth scattered to the ground.

The brass oil lamp cheered: "Well done! Beautifully done! Each and every one of you got what you deserved — Chen Huangpi is merciful, generous enough to give you a quick death. If it had been up to me, I'd have lit you all up as lanterns and made you beg for death without being able to find it!"

"No," Chen Huangpi said in all seriousness, while still striking down deities. "Master says deities are gluttons who do no work. The temple's provisions are running low — we can't afford to keep feeding them. Every last one has to die."

He said it, and he meant it.

Forty deities.

In the blink of an eye, only one was left.

Thud.

That last deity dropped to its knees on the spot, clasped its hands together, and begged piteously: "Spare—"

It never got to finish saying "my life."

Chen Huangpi was not interested in whatever it had to say. A blade of sword qi soaked in killing intent cut it to a heap of yellow earth on the spot.

But the killing intent in his heart hadn't subsided.

So he turned his gaze to the cultivators — now sucked down to nothing but skin and bones.

He gave them no chance to say a word.

Wave after wave of sword qi sliced through.

Heads rolled across the ground in an instant.

Only then did Chen Huangpi feel the tension leave his body, the killing intent in his heart finally easing.

And not just him — even the Soul-Hooking Register seemed pleased.

It radiated a cold, clean chill, smoothing out the last trace of restlessness in Chen Huangpi's heart, as if to say: well done.

He took out the Soul-Hooking Register.

He turned to the page where Song Qiuyue and the other cultivators had signed their names, and carefully tallied up the Nascent Soul spirits now held within.

"Good — every one accounted for."

"And those forty deity souls should be enough to wake A'Gui up."

Chen Huangpi set aside his own portion and let the remaining cultivator souls be swallowed by the dim yellow mist of the Yellow Spring Domain inside the register.

The deities, however, had never signed any name in the register.

Which meant — once the Life-reaping Ghost woke, he could ask it to help him pick out whatever memories interested him.

He was curious about deities.

Though he knew perfectly well that if these deities had been at full incense power, they wouldn't have been the sort of useless things he could dispatch one by one with a single sword strike — still, deities were peculiar, and he very much wanted to understand how these cultivators had become gods.

It had seemed, when Master had the Daoist priests of the temple forge deities, that they always used mud from the Yellow Springs along with certain strange substances.

Those materials were finite — each use diminished the supply.

Which begged the question — were such things abundant outside the Hundred Thousand Mountains?

The Pure Immortal Temple, which had been so busy and full of commotion only moments ago, now fell into sudden, complete silence.

Chen Huangpi walked over to where his master lay flat on the ground, rigid as a plank.

His master had grown two heads.

One was First Master. One was Second Master.

Both faces looked entirely peaceful.

"If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed you actually managed to knock out Guanzhu with a pill."

The brass oil lamp leaned in close, clicking its tongue in wonder. "When Guanzhu wakes up, you are definitely going to get hit."

"He won't wake up that quickly."

Chen Huangpi said with a hint of self-satisfaction: "My pill is a hundred times bigger than a Heaven Toxin Pill. Fighting poison with poison — by the time Master wakes, his illness will have been cured. He'll only praise me. He won't want to hit me."

The brass oil lamp asked with curiosity: "And if Guanzhu doesn't wake up at all?"