Chapter 129: This Is Driving Me to My Grave (Double Chapter)

The changes within his Dantian gradually slowed down and soon came to a complete halt, leaving behind a sizable space inside.

From this point on, Zhou Bai no longer needed a storage pouch, as he was now able to store ordinary objects directly within his Dantian, though spiritual materials could not yet be accommodated.

The area within his Dantian was exceptionally vast, roughly equivalent to about ten sports stadiums, and as his humanitarian divine powers continued to advance, it would only grow larger in the future.

Zhou Bai had also considered trying to store living creatures inside, but the vegetation in his Dantian had only just been planted, and the environment was not yet suitable for animals. Furthermore, lacking a sun and moon, the growth rate of the plants would likely be sluggish, so he had to leave that plan for later consideration.

This metamorphosis of his Dantian into a mini-world was a favorable development for Zhou Bai. According to his design, the integration of Buddhist divine powers into his existing cultivation system made the role of the lower Dantian critically important.

Of course, all of this would have to wait until he officially began practicing Buddhist cultivation techniques. Zhou Bai's current source of confidence was the Great Treasure Glazed Medicine; should he suffer any severe injuries that threatened his foundation, this Buddhist divine power could rapidly help him recover.

The sky was growing late. The ghost tree had recovered its Yin energy for a while and now resumed setting up the spiritual array for the heavenly tribulation. Moving from clumsy to practiced, its speed grew increasingly swift.

Zhou Bai continued to meditate for a time, returning his body and mind to their peak state. He then retrieved a jade box from his storage pouch.

Upon opening it, a faint wave of demonic aura washed over him. Inside lay a fruit no larger than a walnut.

Its skin was a vivid crimson, glistening with a few dewdrops, resembling a miniature peach, albeit far more delicate.

The red fruit, according to rumor, was born from the blood left behind on a tree branch when the Vermilion Bird once rested there, wounded.

According to the records of the Underworld Ministry, a millennium ago, the medicinal potency of the Vermilion Fruit was more than a hundred times greater than it was today. Any mortal who ate it and survived would instantly forge a Golden Core.

Zhou Bai half-believed such claims. It was difficult to imagine what the Nine Provinces were like when spiritual energy still permeated heaven and earth, or just how prosperous Daoism and Buddhism must have been.

Yet nowadays, the Vermilion Fruit was not quite so miraculous. While this spiritual material remained exceedingly rare—taking roughly thirty-odd years from flowering to bearing fruit—its actual effect was merely to push a cultivator's demonic aura to the peak of the novice stage.

However, for many within the Underworld Ministry, the True Form realm felt like a death warrant; they avoided it whenever possible, let alone actively sought to increase their own demonic aura. Not everyone possessed the courage to face a heavenly tribulation.

Consequently, many spiritual materials in the Nine Provinces akin to the Vermilion Fruit, despite their rarity, lacked any real market. Once plucked, they were difficult to preserve, sometimes making it impossible to find a buyer at all.

Zhou Bai even suspected that if he were to walk the streets openly carrying a pound of Vermilion Fruits, the people around him would likely look at him with disdain.

Yet for him, this turned out to be quite advantageous. Zhou Bai could acquire similar spiritual materials at a low cost in contribution points, providing him with a rapid method to boost his cultivation alongside the advancement of his mutated divine powers.

The Vermilion Fruit was stored in a special container capable of sealing its medicinal potency to prevent excessive leakage.

Within just a few breaths after Zhou Bai took it out, the skin of the fruit began to wrinkle slightly, indicating that its medicinal power was beginning to dissipate involuntarily.

He quickly swallowed it in one gulp. Before he could even chew a few times in his mouth, the flesh and skin dissolved into a stream of juice and slid down his throat.

Zhou Bai felt an additional hard object in his mouth and spat it out: a fruit pit the size of a fingernail.

Because the medicinal potency had been absorbed by him, no trace of spiritual material remained on the pit. To a first-time observer, it would easily be mistaken for the seed of some ordinary fruit.

With this thought, he couldn't help but test it. The Vermilion Fruit pit vanished from his hand, instantly reappearing upon the island within his Dantian mini-world.

Zhou Bai had not expected that spiritual materials could enter his Dantian in such a manner. He immediately controlled the soil on the island to churn, burying the pit atop the hill.

If it truly managed to sprout and grow, wouldn't that mean a sustainable cycle? One day, he might even be able to harvest specialty produce from his own mini-world.

And once the yield increased, Zhou Bai could even afford to be extravagant, using large quantities of spiritual materials to brew spiritual wine. Wouldn't drinking a mouthful of that be far more exhilarating than swallowing pills?

However, all of this would have to wait until the mini-world was sufficiently perfected; without a sun and moon, everything else was idle talk. Moreover, the weeds and aquatic algae he had planted on the island and in the water not long ago had mostly begun to wither, with only a tiny fraction surviving.

Zhou Bai set these thoughts aside and focused his attention on the medicinal power of the Vermilion Fruit.

This medicinal power settled deep within his body, appearing entirely out of place. His body showed no inclination to absorb it whatsoever, and even when he actively probed it with his demonic aura, there was no reaction.

If left alone for too long, the medicinal potency of the Vermilion Fruit would eventually be expelled from his body through metabolism. This was where the benefits of the Flawless Body shone: as long as he did not actively purge the medicinal power, it would remain perpetually stored within him.

To absorb the medicinal power, according to Old Rat, Zhou Bai had to wait for nightfall, when the moonlight would cause the potency to volatilize.

This was precisely how demonic entities in the Nine Provinces cultivated, utilizing moonlight to strengthen their demonic aura, while consuming flesh and blood to accelerate the process.

After waiting for roughly two to three hours, a waning moon slowly rose from the horizon, casting a layer of silver light over the valley.

The moment the moonlight shone upon Zhou Bai, the medicinal power within his body underwent an instant transformation, akin to a chemical reaction.

As his demonic aura came into contact with the medicinal power, the latter seamlessly integrated into it, continuously swelling the total volume of his demonic aura.

The Flawless Body did not allow even a fraction of a percent of the Vermilion Fruit's medicinal power to go to waste as the demonic aura gradually devoured it.

Consequently, his demonic aura reached a state of saturation, becoming loose and expansive throughout his entire being. Zhou Bai then directed the salted fish to draw the demonic aura into his body and circulate it.

As time ticked away, the demonic aura grew increasingly pure, rapidly approaching the threshold of the True Form realm.

Zhou Bai instantly felt every cell in his body begin to churn and grow restless, his entire state turning volatile—a situation he had never encountered with his ghostly divine powers.

In fact, when he had broken through to the True Form realm via his ghostly path, his cultivation had been incomplete, and one of the functions of the tribulation-surviving spiritual array had been to help accelerate the accumulation of Yin energy.

Fortunately, Zhou Bai had already spent some time in the True Form realm, and he quickly suppressed this unstable state.

He glanced up at the moon. Next came the awakening of his demonic True Form. Given the extraordinarily high bloodline level of his natal discarded shell, with primary and secondary forces mutually influencing each other, his True Form should be far from ordinary.

Even if it bore some connection to the divine power of "Chicken-Binding Power," it would hardly be an ordinary chicken demon. Zhou Bai was deeply curious about what it would turn out to be.

Yet he couldn't shake the feeling that if it turned out to be avian, its appearance might be overly flamboyant, clashing rather severely with his personal aesthetic.

By late into the night, the spiritual runes had been carved, and the entire heavenly tribulation array was completely finished.

The baptism of the heavenly tribulation would also yield immense benefits for his two natal items, helping to stabilize their foundations.

Zhou Bai released both the ghost tree and the salted fish, allowing them both to assume their full sizes.

The salted fish was somewhat better off; after all, the entire dragon lay coiled upon the ground. Though its twenty-plus-meter body was massive, it did not present an overwhelmingly colossal visual impact.

The ghost tree was entirely different. Its branches extended straight up over the valley, towering even above the surrounding small hills. The leaves, inscribed with divine power runes, emitted a faint, gentle glow in the dead of night.

Out on the distant plain, a handsome man halted his movements. He wore the black uniform of the Underworld Ministry and carried a long black sword, dark blood dripping from the blade.

At his feet lay a corpse with purplish-green skin. Its limbs had all been severed, though it was still clinging to life, emitting miserable wails.

The man stared with a solemn gaze at the swaying tree branches above the valley; he could feel that immense wave of Yin energy from far away.

"Shuo? No, it hasn't formed that scale, but it's definitely not something ordinary malevolent ghosts can rival."

With this thought, he retrieved the token from inside his robe, took a glance at it, and let out an involuntary sigh. He recognized all of his Underworld Ministry colleagues in Xu Province, but the closest one to him was nearly an hour's journey away, prompting him to abandon any thoughts of seeking help.

The man produced a white cloth, wiped the dark blood from his blade, and walked toward the valley.

"Let's go take a look. My hands are getting a bit itchy anyway."

As he walked away, the ghost creature lying on the ground absorbed the ambient Yin energy, and its limbs began to slowly regenerate.

The man suddenly stopped in his tracks, tossed the blood-stained white cloth backward, and casually swung his sword, sending a beam of sword light soaring into the sky.

"Almost forgot about you."

After hurtling upward for a certain distance, the sword light arched downward, plunging back toward the earth at an even greater speed.

A crisp snap echoed through the air as the ghost creature's head was cleanly severed from its body, leaving a long, narrow scar gouged into the earth.

The white cloth fluttered down, landing on the ghost creature. As the remains dissolved into ash, the fabric was swept away by the wind.

As the man drew closer to the valley, heavy dark thunderclouds gathered across the sky, lightning crackling amidst them as the might of heaven grew increasingly palpable.

He frowned, a hypothesis forming in his mind.

In truth, the heavenly tribulations faced by the Underworld Ministry were originally modeled after those of demons and monsters, bearing little visible difference.

Yet this heavenly tribulation looked more and more like a transformation tribulation endured by a demonic entity. Aside from that possibility, the only other explanation was the tribulation accompanying a breakthrough to the True Form realm.

However, that tree's cultivation level even surpassed his own. After a brief, careful deliberation, the man quickly concocted his own explanation.

Someone in the valley must be undergoing a heavenly tribulation, guarded by another expert whose cultivation was at least at the peak of the True Form realm.

That being the case, the man chose not to step into the valley. Should he enter, he would likely be perceived as harboring malicious intent, at which point the peak True Form expert would undoubtedly launch an attack against him.

He found a relatively open spot near the valley to stand. By now, the lightning tribulation overhead had accumulated to its absolute limit; the sheer destructive power contained within these rolling dark clouds was likely more than three times that of an ordinary person's tribulation.

Secretly startled, the man recalled his own tribulation, where the lightning had been only half as strong as this person's—and even so, he had barely escaped with his life.

Moreover, after successfully surviving his tribulation, his master had praised him as a once-in-a-decade genius within the Underworld Ministry. Yet compared to the tribulation before him, he seemed like a mere drop in the ocean.

He shook his head with a trace of regret. The man did not believe that the person inside the valley could survive this heavenly tribulation; potential, until converted into actual strength, remained nothing more than potential.

Amidst this slightly regretful sentiment, he waited a moment longer. The color of the dark clouds had deepened to a pitch-purple; even from a distance, the terrifying heavenly might made his heart skip a beat.

The man simply closed his eyes, rested his long sword across his knees, and focused on withstanding the pressure of this heavenly might, intending to use it to temper his own willpower.

Yet this calm was quickly shattered, for the heavenly might had reached the absolute limit of what the man could endure. He snapped his eyes open from his meditative state and looked up.

The dark clouds in the sky had converged completely, forming a fist-sized purple ball of lightning suspended in mid-air.

The power of this heavenly tribulation was far more exaggerated than the man had anticipated. He had expected around five rounds of lightning strikes, but never imagined that the tribulation would compress itself entirely, intending to unleash everything in a single, catastrophic blast.

What kind of terrifying concept was this? The difficulty had escalated by several fold. Not even leaving dust behind would suffice—was the heavenly tribulation planning to dance on their graves?

Initially, the man had thought that if the person in the valley survived the tribulation, he might befriend them. Now, it seemed unlikely that even a skeleton would remain.

The lightning orb descended slowly, carrying an overwhelmingly oppressive force. Upon touching the ground, blinding arcs of lightning erupted.

The surroundings of the valley turned as bright as day, accompanied only by the deafening roar of countless intertwined lightning bolts.

Amidst it all came the sound of indignant human roars, faintly accompanied by the roar of a dragon, though everything was thoroughly drowned out by the thunder.

When the thunder finally subsided, more than half an hour had passed. The entire valley had been scorched pitch-black, the trees reduced to fine dust, and a choking, acrid odor lingered heavily even from a great distance.

Clinging to a sliver of hope, the man stepped into the valley. The gigantic tree had vanished entirely, and as he walked, his boots crackled and popped from the residual electrical charges lingering in the earth.

Suddenly, he froze. In the distant center of the valley, a figure stood stark naked and motionless, skin charred completely black.

"Crack, crack, crack," sound echoed from the figure.

The charred skin began to peel away piece by piece, revealing a healthy shade of wheat-colored flesh underneath.

The man's normally unflappable heartbeat accelerated violently. To survive a heavenly tribulation of this magnitude meant that this person's mastery of the True Form realm likely eclipsed the entire Underworld Ministry—no, perhaps second only to Zhang Daoling himself.

To think he had once taken pride in his own talent; now, he realized he was merely a frog at the bottom of a well.

Meanwhile, Zhou Bai finally caught his breath and noticed the sudden appearance of the man in the distance. Dressed in the attire of the Underworld Ministry, the man did not appear immediately hostile.

The only troublesome part was that his ghost tree had likely been exposed, and coming up with an explanation for it would be difficult.

At that moment, Zhou Bai felt the demonic aura within his body begin to boil uncontrollably, spilling out through his pores into the external world. Even the air grew warped, and his body began to undergo profound changes.

In the mouth of the valley, a look of anticipation flickered in the man's eyes as he muttered to himself, "The demonic True Form, is it..."