Chapter 279 Arrested
Mu Jianjian immediately gave a brief account of what she had just experienced, and the expressions of the surrounding cultivators noticeably worsened.
This kind of spiritual magic that seeps into one's consciousness... If they were pulled into such a world, would they be able to come back?
The answer is clearly no.
Sang Wanyue lowered her eyes as she recalled her experiences in her previous life.
After his meridians were taken by the one he loved, he was abandoned and watched helplessly as the eldest daughter of the Xuan Shuang Sect defeated Chi Wenqing and sealed him away. But now, upon reflection, things are probably not as simple as they seem.
The people of the Upper Realm are not only far superior in cultivation, but their mastery of secret techniques is also overwhelming. Even with the aid of pills made from the water of the sacred lake, it is still far from enough for them to contend with the other side...
However, this sharpness surprised her... and also made her heart ache.
She spoke in a joking tone about the perilous situation she had just entered, and warned them to be careful. She also glossed over the events that had happened after she was kidnapped by the Jinwu Temple gang. However, one could still see the exhaustion and determination she was trying to maintain in her eyes.
“I guess that only one spirit can be drawn into Gu Qiongyi’s ‘boundary essence’, otherwise she probably wouldn’t only attack me,” Mu Jianjian whispered. “We must quickly find the location of the so-called ‘sacrifice’ they mentioned, otherwise the consequences could be unimaginable once we lose the initiative.”
Having understood the whole story, one of the cultivators in the corner suddenly stood up and asked, "In your opinion, fellow cultivators, we've been used as living sacrifices for their 'sacrifice'?"
"Yes, that's one way to understand it."
After news spread that Bian Yi had been replaced by Ouyang Wenjin, the Ghost Gate Pass was transformed into a fiercely contested area for treasures and artifacts, attracting cultivators who flocked there one after another. They knew very well that people could not escape the allure of profit.
"Then I can go look for them too. My cultivation level isn't high, but I still have a trace of true energy, so I won't let those villains succeed." The man gritted his teeth.
Although he was a member of the caravan, he couldn't sit still after understanding the analysis of the current situation in these people's words. He was not a coward who feared death, so he naturally drove out the so-called "outsiders"!
Turning to the other cultivators, he said, "Are you all willing to be used like this, to be sacrificed alive? Don't forget, many of our brothers died here before!"
Even though his tone was angry and forceful, only a handful of people stood up and echoed his words.
“We will not stop you from leaving or staying,” Ye Wuluo said, glancing at the cultivators who had stood up. “However, whether you stand up to stay or not, you should all swear an oath to keep the matters within the ‘Panmen’ a secret.”
If what happened here were to leak out, the people would be terrified and the cultivators would become agitated, making the situation even more difficult to control.
Mu Jianjian stood in the corner, watching as some resolutely stayed behind to fight the enemy, while others, looking timid, returned the way they came after making their oaths. She was slightly lost in thought.
In a daze, she thought of her first master, Cai Hua.
Is she a good person?
A person who has taken the lives of countless innocent people is certainly not a good person.
But is she a bad person?
She was willing to fight against the people of the upper realm with her own strength, destroying all the places in the garden where "Manluo" was burned, not wanting all the cultivators to suffer from poison. This was her kindness.
The stunningly beautiful woman collapsed into her arms, her breath weak yet resolute, having found the final answer to her own heart, sharing the same nature as the cultivator who had stepped forward before her.
“Let’s start splitting into teams. Searching as a group is too slow, and acting alone is too dangerous. Two people per team is the most suitable,” Sang Wanyue said, glancing at the five cultivators who remained. “Perfect, let’s split into five teams.”
There was a reason she grouped them like that, and Mu Jianjian could naturally see it too.
The five of them knew each other well and knew they were not from the upper realm, so they were able to rule out suspicion and also investigated the people present.
"elder sister……"
Feeling a tug at the hem of her clothes, Mu Jianjian turned her head.
Linghu Zhuoyu's eyes shone brightly, his black pupils like countless stars, and his gray pupils like clear, pure water. "I can't protect you this time, sister. Can you take Xiaohua with you?"
The boy pleaded, reaching out to coil the small flower from his neck into his hands and extending it towards Mu Jianjian.
Mu Jianjian lowered her eyes and said softly, "Okay."
Since one of the upper realm's goals is her, she must think of other ways to prevent her divine consciousness from being invaded and to take more precautions.
——
The groups were formed by random drawing. Mu Jianjian was paired with a short and thin man. As the route branched out more and more, the five groups gradually separated.
Mu Jianjian is now extremely vigilant. Ever since she was "tricked" by the white flowers on the road, she doesn't even let go of the water seeping from the soil. Her mind is on edge.
Xiao Hua clung tightly to Mu Jianjian's neck, her sharp eyes fixed on the back, acting as her eyes from behind.
"Should I call you... Fellow Daoist or Miss?" the man asked tentatively, his voice echoing softly in the quiet stone cave.
"Just call me Fellow Daoist Mu."
The five who stayed behind to travel together were all male cultivators, but it cannot be ruled out that some of them had undergone disguise or bone-changing techniques.
Recalling her experience of being deceived by the male lead, Li Mochen, Mu Jianjian's gloomy face darkened again.
"Alright, then Fellow Daoist Mu can just call me Lao Dong." Lao Dong scratched his head sheepishly and chuckled heartily.
Hearing his accented and nasal tone, Mu Jianjian barely ruled out the possibility that he was that woman.
Recalling Gu Qiongyi's sickly and delicate appearance, several vertical lines appeared on the back of her head again.
At this moment, the blood in the cave soil accumulated more and more, and even in the corners, various talismans were pasted on, emitting an eerie light. When the two reached the corner, an arm that was still bleeding fell from the stone cone above and landed in front of them.
"Fellow Daoist Mu, please be careful."
Old Dong finished speaking and walked ahead of Mu Jianjian. She looked down at his steady steps and asked softly, "Aren't you afraid?"
Both of them were at the early stage of Core Formation, but they took the initiative to walk ahead of her.
She continued, “It’s obvious that the bodies here are fresh. Some cultivators have just walked through here and been killed. There are two possibilities: one is that we’ve come to the right place, and this is the site of the ‘sacrifice’; the other is that it’s a trap they deliberately set.”
Mu Jianjian prefers the second option.
She tried to raise her hand to release the phantom butterflies, but found that the surrounding phantom butterflies seemed to be restricted in some way and could not fly for even a moment.
"Sigh, it's just one life. What's there to be afraid of? If I don't die, someone else will." Old Dong was very open-minded.
The following sentence was like "If I don't go to hell, who will?", and Mu Jianjian finally erased the strange feeling in her heart.
She felt a little regretful that she hadn't partnered with Linghu Zhuoyu, as her research on array formations and talismans was still too superficial.
If Yu Yu were here... she would definitely be able to see through the trickery of these talismans, right?
——
"Chirp chirp chirp—"
A bird's call echoed in the cave, startling the man behind the woman. He looked in the direction of the sound and saw the "red ornament" on the woman's shoulder move.
"What's wrong, Huo Huo?" Sang Wanyue looked down at the restless red ball.
Fire?
What a casual name... Is this a little bird?
As the man was thinking this, he suddenly heard a strange murmur in his ear. Just as he was about to warn it, a dark light came from behind and surrounded his body around the waist.
"Tear—"
Sang Wanyue immediately turned her head, her eyes sweeping over the tentacles covered in countless sharp spikes pulling the man's body into the darkness. She then threw out the two swords in her hand, trying to cut off the tentacles.
Surprisingly, the twin blades did not cause any damage when they touched the tentacles; instead, they were bounced back.
The tentacles moved incredibly fast, accompanied by the man's wailing as Sang Wanyue leaped after them until they entered a dead end.
There were no signs of damage to the surrounding stone walls. Her gaze sharpened as she swept over the splattered blood beside her, then looked up—
On the high stone wall, a monster was hanging upside down, and on the monster stood a woman with long, flowing hair.
No, not standing.
The woman's lower body was fused with the head of the monster. Her gaze was deep and her clothes were revealing. Her hands, as if to soothe, hung down to the monster's face, which was covered with long and short, fine black whiskers. Her vertical black pupils stared straight at Sang Wanyue below.
The monster was dark green all over, with long, thin claws that hooked onto the stone wall. The suction cup-like structure kept it completely still, while countless tentacles behind it swung wildly in the air. One of the tentacles was holding a man!
The man found that no matter how he used his secret technique, he would be sucked away by the suction cups on the tentacles. He gradually lost the desire to call for help and stared at the gaping black maw at the bottom of the monster, his face pale.
"The suction cups on the tentacles...these suction cups can devour your cultivation..."
His voice grew weaker and weaker, and he slowly closed his eyes as he watched the approaching black mouth.
"Snap—"
Sang Wanyue twisted her finger off without expression, uttering two words, "Blood Reversal—"
The man, who had been waiting to die, suddenly felt a downward force. When he opened his eyes, he found that the tentacles on his body had been cut off at some point, and he had fallen to the ground in a sorry state.
Looking at the tentacles wriggling at his feet, he felt a wave of nausea.
"Don't just stand there, take out your magical weapons and start fighting." The temperature in the environment dropped to freezing point, while Sang Wanyue's true energy flowed even faster and more agilely. She flicked her sword and then looked up.
The woman on the monster's head seemed to feel no pain. She continued to stroke its tentacles at a steady pace, as if she were taking good care of it. The monster roared and countless tentacles attacked the two people beneath it.
——
As the two ventured deeper into the area, Mu Jianjian noticed that the talismans around them were becoming fewer and fewer, and the illusionary butterflies were finally able to fly freely.
They didn't encounter any cultivators, so it seems they've left the danger zone?
The thought had barely crossed her mind when she turned around and saw that Lao Dong, who had been standing beside her, was gone.
"Old Dong?"
Hearing the sound echoing in the cave without any response, she tensed up.
"Snap—"
Suddenly feeling her ankle being chained, Mu Jianjian looked down and was surprised to find a hand holding "shackles" on the ground, locking her right leg!
I was careless.
A violent aura emanated from her. She raised her right hand, gripped the Fire Fox Dagger, and slashed at her own right leg without hesitation!
If you can cripple yourself once, you can certainly cripple yourself now!
Mu Jianjian didn't even have a second to think. She knew that hesitation in battle would lead to defeat, but she didn't expect that the shackles would make a "ding" sound and deflect the attack of the Fire Fox Dagger!
When her first attack failed, she turned to the hand gripping the shackles, but to her surprise, the dagger seemed to have struck fire-resistant adhesive, causing no real damage.
"Grass."
The best time to escape has passed, and now there is no chance.
With a curse, Mu Jianjian watched expressionlessly as her body was pulled downwards and sank into the ground, while the hand disappeared from sight.
After she clearly realized this, she suddenly flung the little flower around her neck to the ground where there was no talisman. Meeting the little flower's panicked and uneasy eyes, she raised her index finger to her lips and made a "shh" gesture.
Little Flower wanted to wag its tail and rush over, but saw the girl shake her head and mouth the words.
"More than two people, do not travel alone... stay away from here."
After uttering those twelve words, the girl's entire body disappeared into the ground, as if she had never existed.
Little Flower hesitated for two seconds, quickly assessed its own fighting strength, and then turned around and rushed back the way it came.
Master, help! It's so useless, please save my sister!
——
"Hey, I've got you!"
Mu Jianjian thought there would be lava below like before, but she didn't expect to land on a stone platform carved in the shape of a lotus flower.
The short boy who was narrating the scene caught her and teased her softly beside her.
"Yi Yi said you're quite capable, but in my opinion, you're nothing special."
Mu Jianjian ignored the boy beside her. She was about to get up and fight when she was stunned by the scene before her. In the huge palace, she was sitting on a lotus platform with shackles on her feet, and below her stood a dense crowd of cultivators dressed in different clothes.
The monks looked blank and wooden, their hands clasped together in front of their chests, muttering something under their breath.
These were cultivators from the lower realms who had been tricked into coming here; she could even see people from the same caravan wearing similar clothing.
No wonder they didn't encounter anyone else on their journey; it turns out the survivors had already been taken into custody here...
Mu Jianjian felt a sense of oppression, and a rare feeling of suffocation welled up in her heart.
She can fight one or two people, but how can she fight against hundreds of cultivators?
"Tsk tsk tsk, the puppet is ignoring people." A soft sigh came from the boy.
Turning her head, she saw three people dressed in similar black robes standing beside the lotus stone platform where she was sitting.
Each person had a blooming lotus flower sewn on the chest of their robe. One of the women had a flirtatious look in her eyes and was clearly Gu Qiongyi. Apart from the white-haired boy, the other man's figure was more like that of a fully grown brown bear, extremely strong, and his expression could not be seen because he was wrapped in black cloth.
"What do you want to do by going to such lengths to capture me?"
Not wanting to appear weak, Mu Jianjian looked straight ahead and spoke calmly.
Even though she knew the other party wouldn't answer, she still dragged out the time.
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