Chapter 414: Lost Contact
Xue Li followed Mo Bei and left.
Mo Bei was originally going to Scattered Rain City to help Xue Li’s wife, Mo Lingye, by buying the Soul Mending Clover. Since Xue Li could not enter the Graveyard of Gods with Qin Lie and also desperately wanted to see his wife, he simply left after they agreed on where to meet up in the future.
Once Xue Li and Mo Bei left, Qin Lie sat in the belly of the seventh mountain alone. After some thought, he took out the half of the Blood Codex that Xue Li had given him.
The bone fragment was the size of a palm.
It was extremely heavy and was translucent while it shone with a bloody glow, as if it had been forged from carnelian.
According to Xue Li’s explanation, this half of the Blood Codex had been written on a small piece of the Blood Progenitor’s bone. The secret arts of Blood Fiend Sect were stored it, and its mysteries were difficult to fathom.
Qin Lie attempted to put a wisp of his mind consciousness into the Blood Codex.
“Boom!”
A shiny ball of bloody light gushed out of the bone fragment, pushing his mind consciousness away from it.
His wisp of consciousness was actually unable to seep into the fragment.
“Huh!”
Softly crying out, Qin Lie’s eyes quietly lit up as he channeled the Blood Spirit Art.
The thick scent of blood spread from his pores and formed a thin blood mist. Then he gathered refined blood energy into his mind consciousness.
Qin Lie once again attempted to soak his consciousness into the Blood Codex!
He did not encounter any obstacles this time, and his mind consciousness slipped straight into the Blood Codex like a long thread of blood.
He suddenly found himself falling toward a sea of bloody symbols.
“Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh!”
The hundreds of thousands of bloody symbols and words inside of the blood bone resembled red, translucent gemstones, yet they flew like bloody butterflies and spirit birds.
The bloody symbols were of fantastic oddities of every description. Furthermore, they constantly transformed, making them truly difficult to fathom.
As he floated amidst the sea of bloody symbols, Qin Lie felt a large amount of information flood into his mind, all of it rebounding toward the True Soul in his Soul Lake.
“Blood Arts: Explode!”
“Blood Arts: Soul Shackle!”
“Blood Weeping Ghost Claw!”
“Blood Demon Art!”
Qin Lie’s mind consciousness lingered within the sea of bloody symbols. Memories and thoughts leaped into his mind like numerous bloody lights, allowing him to learn the numerous cultivation secrets of Blood Fiend Sect.
“This truly is amazing!”
Qin Lie focused his mind and allowed himself to freely soar through the sea of bloody symbols, examining the many magical spirit arts of the blood.
“Blood Spirit Art! Blood Spirit Art!”
Thousands of giant symbols that resembled translucent gemstones formed a distinct river of blood amidst the bloody sea. The sanguine symbols flipped and turned as if someone were flipping a book.
Qin Lie concentrated and learned.
Time swiftly passed.
An unknown amount of time later, Qin Lie gradually awakened as his eyes, which had been closed, opened.
Very carefully, he stored the translucent bloody bone back into his spatial ring. He wore a complicated expression on his face.
“Cultivation of the Blood Spirit Art is pretty dangerous. No wonder Jiang Zhuzhe and the others fell to evil ways,” Qin Lie muttered with a serious expression.
To put it bluntly, cultivation of the Blood Spirit Art was the condensation of one’s blood and the use blood energy to temper one’s bones, nerves, and flesh. Not only did it allow the practitioner to possess a powerful physique, it also allowed their blood to store a terrifying amount of energy.
The method of speeding up the cultivation of the Blood Spirit Art and building the blood pools were recorded in that half of the Blood Codex. After filling a blood pool with the blood of spirit beasts and adding all kinds of spirit herbs, a practitioner could soak their body in it and absorb the essence of the blood energy within the pool, gradually merging the essence with their own. This tempered their body, enhanced their blood energy, refined their blood…
This was the regular way one would cultivate the Blood Spirit Art.
The blood of spirit beasts did not contain a tangled mess of memories and thought fragments. The cultivation method recorded inside of the Blood Codex used blood pools and added spirit herbs to them to clean the worthless residual thought fragments in the blood, giving them a miraculous blood purifying effect.
Through this method, the practitioner would not absorb the thought fragments and diverse memories when tempering their body with blood energy, enhancing the spirit energy of their blood.
As a result of this, they would not experience a fiendish rebound, lose control when channeling the Blood Spirit Art, or lose their sanity.
On the other hand, the path that Jiang Zhuzhe and his people walked was a shortcut.
—They did not rely on blood pools or the blood of spirit beasts. Instead, they absorbed blood directly from a martial practitioner’s body!
In fact, to a disciple of Blood Fiend Sect, the fresh blood of a human was more suitable for cultivation compared to the fresh blood of a spirit beast. The fresh blood of a human did not need to be purified by spirit herbs, cultivated with a blood pool, or absorbed through one’s pores. A disciple could just drink it like water.
Blood from one human was similar to another’s, after all, but beast’s blood wasn’t. Therefore, it needed to be purified through a complicated process.
While using human blood was more preferable than beast blood, doing so also had a huge flaw—humans were highly intelligent, and their blood contained many thought fragments, confusing memories, and negative emotions.
Although directly absorbing human blood for cultivation purposes could swiftly increase one’s strength, it also meant that one would absorb thought fragments, memories, and negative emotions into their own blood.
The more human blood a practitioner absorbed, the more thought fragments, memories, and negative emotions they would accumulate.
The impurities inside of Jiang Zhuzhe’s and Jiang Tianxing’s bodies caused them to lose control of their bodies during battle. When the thought fragments, memories, and negative emotions within one’s blood erupted, they would take direct control of the practitioner’s body, leading to the host itself being controlled by blood!
According to the accounts in this half of the Blood Codex, the people who cultivated using this method would accumulate more and more thought fragments, memories, and negative emotions inside of their blood. In fact, they could even give birth to a terrible blood soul. As the blood soul grew stronger and stronger, it would ultimately devour their own cultivator and replace the main soul of the body.
When that happened, the person who cultivated this type of Blood Spirit Art would no longer be themselves. In fact, they would no longer even be considered human. They will have completely transformed into a “Blood Demon”!
This cultivation method meant that the practitioner would ultimately cultivate to the point of completely losing themselves. It was the same as breeding a monster with a confused soul in their own blood that would ultimately devour them.
This was a tragic ending. However, the moment that a cultivator fell to this evil path, discovering that this cultivation method would allow them to improve at a ridiculous speed, they wouldn’t be able to control their thirst for human blood.
Just like being hooked on drugs, they would forever lose themselves in the act.
After clarifying the differences between the two types of cultivation arts, Qin Lie made up his mind to never cultivate by directly absorbing human blood. He had no intention of losing himself and being devoured by a blood soul, ultimately turning into a blood demon.
He did not know if Jiang Zhuzhe and the others were aware of this consequence. He also did not know what their reaction would be if they realized that they would lose their soul if they cultivated this path to the very end.
Qin Lie was not in a hurry to leave.
In the belly of the mountain, he researched and tested the many secret arts that were meant to complement the Blood Spirit Art, such as Blood Arts: Explode, Blood Arts: Soul Shackle, Blood Weeping Ghost Claw, and Blood Arts: Escape, attempting to simplify them.
Ten days later, he understood how to unleash them and etched them deep into his memory. Only then did he leave the Blood Cloud Mountain Range.
Qin Lie rode the Cloud Sailboat on a scheduled return journey and went back to Black Jade City.
He returned to Black Jade City about ten days later and headed to the small house in North City.
He hadn’t even gotten close to the house before he came to a stop with a grim face.
Numerous martial practitioners were gathered around the house. Many people were whispering and gesturing toward it.
Qin Lie said nothing, staying a fair distance away from the crowd and listening to their conversation.
As he learned more and more about what happened, he grew quieter by the second.
He eventually understood what was going on.
Not long after he left, some martial practitioners in North City were attracted by the beauty of Song Tingyu, Xie Jingxuan, and Tang Siqi and attempted to humiliate them by sneaking in at night.
A bloody battle erupted immediately afterward.
During the battle, Feng Rong unleashed the Blood Spirit Art and slaughtered many of the attackers.
She did not know that the Blood Spirit Art was a forbidden art in the Heavenly Calamity Continent. When someone recognized the Blood Spirit Art she cultivated, they immediately screamed.
Soon enough, Feng Rong realized from the screams that the Blood Spirit Art was considered an evil art and that anyone who used it would be mercilessly killed.
She also learned from those people just how merciless the Xiahou Family, the Su Family, and the Lin Family of the Heavenly Calamity Continent were toward the people who cultivated Blood Spirit Arts.
Feng Rong panicked.
After realizing the truth, they killed all of the attackers and escaped using the Xiahou Family’s teleportation formation before they could react.
Not long after they left, some people arrived and recognized that the severe injuries of the deceased were marks unique to the Blood Spirit Art.
These people immediately reported this to the Xiahou Family.
As a result, the elites of the Xiahou Family in Black Jade City immediately mobilized to search the entire city for Feng Rong and her group.
They quickly discovered that, while they were still unaware of everything, Feng Rong and the others had already left the Heavenly Calamity Continent through the teleportation formation. They had gone to the Heavenly Fissure Continent.
The Xiahou Family, the Su Family, and the Lin Family sent many martial practitioners, who were said to have also gone to the Heavenly Fissure Continent, to kill Feng Rong’s group to the last person.
After quietly listening for a moment, Qin Lie shrank into a hidden corner and put on the fox skin mask. Then he quietly left the area.
He prepared ready to leave the Heavenly Calamity Continent as soon as possible.
However, not long after Song Tingyu and the others were forced to leave, Qin Lie encountered a problem—he did not have enough spirit stones to teleport to the Heavenly Fissure Continent.
It costed one thousand Earth Grade spirit stones to teleport to the Heavenly Fissure Continent using the teleportation formation here. However, Qin Lie only had about two hundred Earth Grade spirit stones in his spatial ring.
Song Tingyu was originally going to pay for him, so he had not paid much attention to the matter.
Since Song Tingyu and the others had left in a hurry and the Trial in the Graveyard of Gods was about to start, Qin Lie needed to gather enough spirit stones as soon as possible to leave this place.
After spending a day’s time, he figured out that another group of people had harbored ill will toward Tang Siqi and the others.
When these people rushed to the house during the latter half of the night that Tang Siqi and the others were attacked, they discovered that another group of people had gotten ahead of them. However, this first group of people had been killed. It was the second group of people who noticed the traces of the Blood Spirit Art on the bodies and reported the news to the Xiahou Family, receiving three thousand Earth Grade spirit stones as reward.
At midnight, Qin Lie visited these people at the house in North City.
An explosion roared in the dead of night, engulfing the house. Four Terminator Profound Bombs had blown that group of martial practitioners into smithereens.
Qin Lie then took their spatial rings and quietly left.
He had acquired funds to pay for his journey to the Heavenly Fissure Continent.