Chapter 31

A cultivator needs to be struck by one heavenly thunderbolt when he reaches the foundation-building stage, three thunderbolts when he reaches the enlightenment stage, and five thunderbolts when he reaches the fusion stage.

Su Jinzhou's first three heavenly thunders fell very quickly. He resisted the first two with his physical body and spiritual power, and only took out the magic weapon he found in Ji Tang's storage bag for the third one.

The protective shield that originally covered the two of them could only cover one person as they separated, and was now protecting Ji Tang in the corner.

Su Jinzhou resisted the third heavenly thunder, but the fourth one had not yet fallen.

What Jitang was worried about finally happened.

The speed at which the thunder falls depends largely on the cultivator's state of mind.

Only when one has a clear mind and a pure heart can one accept the test of heavenly thunder without distraction. For a case like Su Jinzhou where the thunder did not fall for a long time, other reasons cannot be ruled out, but the state of mind is definitely the most important factor.

No one can help him, he has to overcome it himself.

Su Jinzhou's spiritual energy surged throughout his body, but his face became paler and paler.

He frowned and looked in very bad condition.

His sea of consciousness and his soul were both undergoing a test, and this test was the key to determining whether he could continue to move forward steadily on the path of cultivation.

Time passed minute by minute, and after an unknown amount of time, the fourth thunder finally fell.

Ji Tang was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when he didn't expect the fifth thunder to follow closely. It happened that it hit Su Jinzhou one after the other, accompanied by a loud thunderstorm.

At the same time as the two thunders fell, the place where they were began to shake violently.

Ji Tang inserted his dagger into the monster's flesh and barely managed to stabilize his body.

She stood up and looked, and found that not only their corridor, but all the other corridors were shaking violently.

She looked towards the place where the thunder fell. The previous three thunders only opened a tiny hole in the monster's body. As the fourth and fifth thunders penetrated, the small hole became bigger due to the bombardment of thunder. Ji Tang could even see the dark sky outside through the hole.

The reason they felt the vibration was because the monster was reacting to the pain from being struck by the thunder.

The roar of the monster followed, and the sound was clearly transmitted to Ji Tang's ears through the penetrating hole, making her ears hurt.

Jitang looked at Su Jinzhou anxiously.

His body was tightly wrapped by two bolts of lightning. Ji Tang could only see the lightning and a shadow inside. When she wanted to take a closer look, the dazzling light of the lightning forced her to close her eyes.

The monster was shaking even more violently.

Ji Tang was secretly anxious.

The dagger that was stuck in the monster's flesh fell off, her hand was free, and she was thrown out with the shaking.

"Sujinzhou!!"

Her answer was an even more deafening roar of lightning.

A burning smell kept coming.

That was the smell produced by the overflowing lightning hitting the monster meat, burning the pink meat into a charred black.

Ji Tang activated his nightmare energy and thrust the dagger into the flesh again.

The protective shield on her body was shattered by the overflowing thunder. She had no time to look for the magic weapon in her storage bag, so she directly protected herself with the nightmare energy.

The moment the nightmare spirit protected the body, the talisman that sealed the monster's demon pill suddenly moved.

Several talismans were not affected by the thunder tribulation, but they flew up and floated in the air the moment Ji Tang used the nightmare energy.

The talisman changed its position quickly. If Ji Tang saw it, he would find that the talisman constructed a different magic circle every time it changed its position.

The moment Ji Tang wrapped her body in nightmare energy, she realized it was flowing in one direction. It was like a distant suction force trying to suck all of her nightmare energy away.

It was at this time that Ji Tang discovered that there was something wrong with the talisman - it was the magic circle constructed by the talisman that absorbed the nightmare energy.

Her nightmare energy was getting less and less. In addition to the nightmare energy that protected her body being sucked away, the magic circle actually passed through the nightmare energy outside her body and directly sucked the nightmare energy out of her body.

She has not reached the Golden Core Stage and has not yet formed the Nightmare Soul Pill.

There was no place to store the nightmare energy, and the energy that was sucked out of her body was all the nightmare energy she had cultivated so far.

These nightmare auras that had been accumulated with countless efforts entered the magic circle constructed by the talismans in an instant.

Jitang suddenly lost his strength.

Without the reinforcement of nightmare energy, the dagger slid out along the blade where it was inserted and fell on the pink flesh, becoming useless.

At the same time, the magic circle sucked away all of Ji Tang's nightmare energy, and the light in the circle became brighter. The dark purple mist that continuously spread out in the golden light seemed to be substantial, and there was something wrapped inside.

Ji Tang stared at it and took a while to figure out that it was a dark purple jade plate that was darker and heavier than the color of the mist.

The jade token absorbed all the swirling and steaming mist, and the golden light of the magic circle gradually faded. The dark purple jade token was clearly revealed, floating above the magic circle.

Ji Tang knelt on the pink flesh and looked at the jade token in fear.

It was this jade token that destroyed her thirty years of cultivation.

The thunder from the sky failed to affect it in the slightest.

It floated, and in Ji Tang's guarded and vigilant eyes, it suddenly flew towards Ji Tang like a stream of dark purple light, sank into Ji Tang's forehead, and rushed straight into her sea of consciousness.

Jitang heard Su Jinzhou calling her name anxiously.

She looked in the direction of Su Jinzhou. In the thunder and lightning, Su Jinzhou leaned half of his body towards her - he wanted to block the dark purple jade token.

However, the jade token was too fast, leaving them no time to react.

Jitang fell to the ground and lost consciousness.

*

When Ji Tang regained consciousness, he found himself in an empty space filled with dark purple smoke.

Her feet couldn't touch the ground, and when she reached out to grab the smoke in front of her, the smoke would instantly overflow from between her fingers, and when she opened her palms, there was nothing left.

"Su Jinzhou?"

"Junior brother?"

Jitang called out, but there was no response.

She had no sense of time here, and the surroundings were filled with smoke, making it impossible to see anything clearly.

I don’t know how long it took before the smoke in front of me slowly dissipated, revealing the jade token inside.

Ji Tang's first reaction was to step back when she was scared, but because her body was floating in the air and there was nothing to step on, she didn't know whether she had stepped back or not.

The jade token flew in front of Jitang in the blink of an eye.

Ji Tang's nightmare energy was sucked away by the jade token. Without the nightmare energy, she couldn't even open her storage bag.

Thinking of this, her hand subconsciously reached for the storage bag at her waist, but found nothing.

Ji Tang looked down in shock and found that the storage bag around his waist was missing.

She was at her wit's end.

The jade token was the knife and she was the fish, and she could only lie down and be cut.

Although Jitang was afraid, he still forced himself to look at the jade token.

She didn't want to give up until the last moment.

The jade token floated closer and closer to her. Ji Tang's heart was beating fast and a thin layer of sweat had already appeared on his forehead.

When the jade token was close enough for her to reach, she suddenly waved her hand, trying to knock it away.

The moment his hand touched the jade token, Ji Tang's hand felt not cold and hard jade, but a slightly soft and warm feeling.

The jade token glowed slightly, and a gentle force emerged. It was not so much pushing her hand away as protecting her hand from getting hurt.

Jitang looked at it blankly.

The jade plate slowly rose and the light gradually grew brighter.

The place it illuminates is one that Jitang is very familiar with——

This is the two-story wooden house where she lives in the Nightmare Clan.

She stood in front of the door of the wooden house, and the jade token was hanging on the roof of the wooden house.

Jitang walked around the wooden house and was very familiar with every corner.

Apart from the wooden house, she looked elsewhere and still saw the diffuse dark purple smoke. Under the light of the jade plate, the smoke was like a dream and flowed slowly like quicksand.

Seeing that the jade token did not respond, Jitang tentatively pushed open the door of the wooden house.

She entered the wooden house, her feet touched the ground, and her heart felt at ease.

Her gaze stopped at the crabapple blossom in full bloom on the wooden door, and her hand holding the door handle suddenly tightened.

She didn't place this crabapple blossom in the Nightmare Clan's cabin. Instead, when she left the Nightmare Clan and traveled outside, she missed the crabapple blossoms in her clan and condensed one in her sea of consciousness.

In other words, she is now in her own sea of consciousness.

Jitang closed the door and locked it to prevent the jade pendant from coming in.

She had entered her sea of consciousness countless times. This wooden house, which was the same as the one used by the Nightmare Clan, was also condensed bit by bit in her sea of consciousness with the power of her soul. She knew it very well.

The reason why she didn't realize that she was in the sea of consciousness at the first time was because she had never left the wooden house before.

Her sea of consciousness will gradually expand according to her level of cultivation.

When she was in the foundation-building stage, her sea of consciousness was only half an acre in size. As her level increased and she reached the fusion stage, the space in her sea of consciousness was enough for her to condense this two-story wooden house. It was not until she reached the heart-beating stage that she made this wooden house exactly the same as the place where the nightmare clan lived.

This is the entire size of her sea of consciousness.

She had tried to push the wooden door open before, but never succeeded.

Because the area outside the wooden door was beyond the size of her sea of consciousness, if she wanted to push it open, she might have to wait until her cultivation level continued to improve.

But now, when she appeared in the sea of consciousness, she was outside the wooden house, so she was not discovered to have entered the sea of consciousness at the first time.

Ji Tang knew without a doubt that it was related to the jade token.

As soon as she thought of the jade token, it fell directly in front of Ji Tang.

Well, it’s useless for her to close or lock the door. The jade token doesn’t go through the door at all, and people can come in directly through the roof.

Apart from sucking away all her nightmare energy, the jade token hadn't harmed her so far, so Ji Tang boldly approached to study it.

The jade pendant appears to be made of jade, but when you get closer you realize that it is actually made of water, it just looks like a jade pendant.

As soon as Ji Tang got closer, he could feel the extremely powerful aura of nightmare coming towards him.

She couldn't help but feel heartbroken, as this contained the result of her many years of diligent practice!

The water sign hovered in front of her.

It seemed that Jitang had not moved for too long, so it took the initiative to move closer and kept floating up and down.

Seeing it suddenly move, Jitang quickly stepped back.

The water sign followed her closely, the light on the sign having dimmed to a mere glimmer.

Ji Tang had nowhere to retreat and stretched out her hand to block it. At this moment, the water sign stopped approaching and floated on her palm, staying still.

Ji Tang didn't understand what was going on and nervously put his hands down.

The water sign floated for a moment, and then the faint light became dazzling.

Ji Tang closed his eyes instinctively, and when he opened them again, the water sign had disappeared, replaced by three bamboo slips and a dark purple soul fragment.

Jitang hesitated and grabbed the first one on the left and opened it.

There was actually a letter from home in the bamboo slips.

Jitang only read the first two words, and his hands holding the bamboo slips began to tremble uncontrollably.

"Tang'er:

Now that you have come to Qingmang Yanyue Mountain, you must be curious about the moon on the mountain, right?

Let me tell you a secret. Go find Aunt Yu Jin. You can see the moon in her cave. It’s very beautiful.

This is your first stop in searching for souls. Is everything going well?

You are still young, so there is no need to rush to become strong. You can follow the route set by your father and I, travel all over Kyushu and see all the beautiful scenery in the world.

I guess you are probably in the body of a monster right now, right?"

"..." When Jitang saw this, his excitement and sadness were slightly stuck, and he felt a little amused and helpless.

So this 'first stop' was deliberately set up by her parents inside the monster's body?

Following this line of thought, she could probably guess that the yellow talismans came from her parents, and the dragon language drawn on them came from her stepmother Yu Jin.

She continued reading.

"The Nightmare Card I condensed can only be activated by your Nightmare Qi. It will absorb all the Nightmare Qi you have cultivated so far.

Don't cry. This is what you must go through in your search for the soul, and it is also what you will have to do all the time. Your father and I have written the details on the other two bamboo slips.

You can practice slowly, and don't rush to find your soul. Just proceed step by step. Your father and I both hope you can be healthy and happy, and enjoy your life. That's what's most important.

Love your mother, Wen Jihuai."

Jitang took a deep breath, stroked it repeatedly, and slowly closed the bamboo slips reluctantly.

She then took the two bamboo slips in the middle and on the right.

When he opened them, he discovered that the two bamboo slips contained the Nightmare Clan's secret manuals on internal skills.

One volume contains the secret of Nightmare Yuanyan, and the other volume contains the book of Nightmare Chengshu.

Jitang felt that the names of these two skills were somewhat familiar. After thinking for a moment, he finally remembered.

The Nightmare Yuanyan Shangjue and the Nightmare Chengshu are two internal skills of the Nightmare Clan that have been lost for a long time. They were jointly written by the earliest generations of clan leaders of the Nightmare Clan and are also the supreme internal skills of the Nightmare Clan.

It stands to reason that a junior like Ji Tang could not know these two techniques, but she is the legitimate daughter of the thirteenth generation clan leader and has the purest Nightmare Clan bloodline.

The Nightmare Clan passed down their bloodline from the eldest to the youngest, from father to son, from generation to generation until the thirteenth generation, when Jitang's father disappeared, and the Nightmare Clan's bloodline was cut off.

The current clan leader is Elder Xue Mei, who used to follow Ji Yulan.

At that time, Jitang was still young and could not be qualified to be the clan leader, but because of his noble status and pure blood, he was able to access clan secrets that other members of the clan could not.

Even if the people in the tribe racked their brains, they would never have imagined that these two skills that could not be found no matter what were actually kept by her parents in the nightmare card and sealed in the body of a monster.

Jitang now understood why his mother used the nightmare card to absorb all of her nightmare energy - because if she wanted to practice two techniques, she had to start from the beginning and practice again according to the secret manual.

The overwhelming Nightmare Qi on the Nightmare Cards mostly comes from the Mother. The texture of water is actually a liquid formed by the compression and condensation of the enormous Nightmare Qi.

She temporarily closed the bamboo slips, turned her gaze to the dark purple soul fragment, and then took the fragment into her body.

This is her sea of consciousness.

The body in the sea of consciousness is not her real body, but is condensed from her primordial spirit, which can be understood as the embodiment of a part of her primordial spirit.

Therefore, the integration of fragments into the body is equivalent to integration with the original spirit.

As the fragments merged into his soul, Jitang also saw scenes of himself interacting with his parents.

At that time, she was running in a sea of crabapple blossoms all over the mountains. She was so small that only the top of her head was visible.

Her mother's laughter seemed to be ringing in her ears, chasing after her.

Begonia petals fell on her head, on her mother's long black hair, and on the purple and pink skirts of two figures, one big and one small, like a rain of flowers.

Not far away, their father sat on a rock, his eyes gentle as he watched them play with a smile.

Jitang's eyes were moist without him realizing it.

She paused for a long time before silently putting away the bamboo slips.

The disappeared nightmare card reappeared and put the bamboo slips into it.

Ji Tang gently stroked the nightmare card, and the nightmare card emitted a faint light, a slightly warm light, as if responding to her and comforting her.

She held the nightmare card in her arms, her consciousness gradually blurred, and she fell into a deep sleep.