Lu Qingshan left behind most of his insects to continue watching the tunnels. They would be able to keep guard for many days until they starved from the lack of food. Still, it would be enough for him to check up on his sect.

  He quickly rushed out of the forest. The fly swarms that had gone down into the ruins with him scattered across his sight lines and disappeared. When they encountered movement, they would return to him.

  But this didn’t happen. Lu Qingshan let a small seed of hope grow in his heart. He made it back towards the herb garden and finally saw what had happened to them.

  Fires raged all throughout his sect. Martial artists were running around and putting them out. Demonized human corpses littered the entire place, but the injuries in their bodies told many stories.

  Lu Qingshan drew closer, and An Xin came out to meet him. “You’re back,” she said. “We got your warning. They weren’t able to do too much damage to our herb garden before something happened to them in the middle of the attack.”

  “Tell me more,” he said, walking beside her to a particularly smelly pile of bodies. Claw wounds marred their wretched skin, and teeth marks were littered all over their limbs. These weren’t wounds his martial artists could make.

  “They tore each other apart after something happened. At first they were just stunned at first, unmoving, recovering enough of their faculties to fight back when attacked. Then they just went crazy.”

  Lu Qingshan was relieved to hear that slaying the demon fetus had some effect. Too bad the effect was so obvious, though. It was likely the demonic cultivators had long gotten wind of the incident and had fled.

  “Did you see anyone in a dark cloak?” he asked.

  “No,” An Xin said, shaking her head. “Were there other enemies?”

  “Maybe. Those were the escaped demonic cultivators, with new clothes.”

  “We did some scouting when we saw your…bug arrive, but we only detected these creatures heading our way. No one else was there.”

  Lu Qingshan nodded. “I think they ran away, but keep an eye out. This will buy us some time until they come back with reinforcements. In the meantime, we excavate this place for all we can. Gather everyone together.”

  While An Xin went to play messenger, Lu Qingshan sent his flies and spiders into another feeding frenzy. Food was scarce the more demonized insect swarms he slaughtered. They did reproduce, using some method he didn’t know about, but the process was slow enough that he began to see a noticeable decrease in the amount of enemies patrolling the area. This batch of meat would last his insects a while.

  He discovered a still-alive wriggling worm on several of the demonized humans. The Insect Harmony Mantra suppressed them, then formed a spiritual connection. These were sensory spiritual insects, linked towards one other connection, but the direction was vague and illusory. As soon as he received information about the worms’ capabilities, they died the next moment.

  Lu Qingshan frowned. That was completely unexpected. Under the effect of his mantra, they shouldn’t have been able to die on their own. But he did feel a brief spiritual pulse from that singular connection on the other end. Perhaps it was that thing which had killed off the worms.

  The incident was marked down as something to learn. After he had cleaned up all the bodies, disposing of these eavesdropping worms somewhere far away, Lu Qingshan returned to the sect and entered the meeting room. Everyone of note was gathered here, if they survived.

  “Losses?” he asked, immediately seeing some faces missing.

  “A few who tried to desert,” Liu Yingting reported. “There were also some who rebelled. We put them down.”

  “Wounds?”

  “Mostly light. We fought them off well at first. They were beginning to gain ground when they suddenly turned on one another. I assume you had a hand in that, sect master.”

  “I did. It was a demon fetus controlling them,” Lu Qingshan said. “It’s been handled, but we need to study it so that we’re not caught off guard the next time.”

  The sect members nodded. Even the stray martial artists from the outside followed his words. After surviving a life and death battle with the Seven Mysteries Gate, they were becoming more acclimated with the others.

  Lu Qingshan was happy to see this. He collated the extent of their damages; no herbs had been harmed. This was a great boon.

  Then he scattered the miscellaneous items from the ruined complex onto a makeshift wooden table. He had picked up anything that looked vaguely different from their surroundings. Hopefully, one of them contained spiritual qualities. There wasn't a way for him to tell just yet.

  The immortal cultivators looked through each one. Most of them were junk, given to his earthworm to devour. But there were two items that stood out to them.

  One was a small stone shaped like an eye. Grooves along the edges of the sphere made it look similar to a pupil, and a dark stain in the center was where the cultivators agreed that the spiritual energy flowed through. This was an artifact.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "I've never seen anything like it," An Xin said. "But then again, we don't know much about the specifics of artifact refinement."

  "Can you try activating it?"

  "I can, but we should do so in a safer place. All unappraised artifacts can cause danger for someone unwary, which is another reason why artifact refiners are good to have."

  The second object was a stone box. It required Qin Ye's larger amounts of Jade Cleansing spirit qi in order to open. What came out was a pack of seeds. It was grain.

  "Spirit rice," Li Fanghua muttered. "Food!"

  The An siblings' eyes widened. They set down the stone eye artifact and rushed to handle the seeds themselves. Judging from their expression, this thing was wondrous.

  "They're key foods for us immortal cultivators," An Xin answered his questioning gaze. "They're used to help sustain our cultivation, especially in the Qi Refinement realm. Fasting pills can also be made from them if only we had an alchemist."

  “Get them planted as soon as possible.” Lu Qingshan knew this was what they needed to truly sustain themselves inside this place. With enough quantities of rice, they never even had to leave. “Do you think there were more packets left behind?

  “There has to be,” An Xin declared. “This packet might initially be enough to feed only two or three people depending on how good the farmer is. After a few generations of harvest, it’ll be a different story, but arrangements like this are meant to revitalize a sect after its destruction. Keeping just a single packet safe would go completely against that goal.”

  Then their first priority was to explore the giant forest and the ruined complex again. Getting these seeds planted early would be best.

  “It’s time to set out.” Lu Qingshan looked around their campgrounds for anything that could be used as a shovel. Such a tool was not usually carried by martial artists, but he found a few spades from the others not in his sect. “Bring those with us,” he said.

  The lot of them began moving towards the direction of the ruined complex. This was a project that would take a while. Fortunately, they had ample time.

  But Lu Qingshan would only feel safe once he had reached the next realm. Even so, an immortal cultivator might still be able to take his head once they reached a minor stage higher than his. There was no telling how the Heavenly Demon Disintegration Technique would react once he reached that realm.

  Would it still work? He had no way to tell, and so had to make greater preparations. The list of possible gu refinements was one way to work through all his options.

  Qin Ye remained in the herb garden with Wu Ruoling and the An siblings. Having them there basically made the garden highly resistant to an attack by the demonic cultivators in case they tried one last attempt at revenge. The next batch of herbs would arrive a while later. And they were very motivated to begin planting the spirit rice. After all, it would be the first taste of real spiritual food in a while.

  Song Lin came with them to the giant forest. Frustrated with the slow pace of his cultivation, he had decided to continue exploring instead of sitting in a room all day. In his hands were some of the group’s bags that he wanted to carry all of a sudden.

  “I just didn’t want to be like my cousin. Always looking down on others,” he said. “It made me sick.”

  “It’s good you had that epiphany,” Lu Qingshan remarked. “Then what do you want to do now?”

  “I’m not going to rush Jade Cleansing. It will come in due time. I’m going to sample the sights and sounds of the world instead of locking myself up inside a room all day.”

  Lu Qingshan’s heart was slightly shaken. It had been almost twenty years living in this world, but he still remembered how he used to act in his past life. “That’s good,” he muttered.

  The Seven Mysteries Gate arrived at the giant forest. Lu Qingshan reconnected with his insect swarms. There hadn’t been any enemies who had disturbed them.

  He assumed the demonic cultivators had fled. Perhaps they were fearful of whoever was able to slay the demon fetus. With nine lives and methods to attack the soul, most cultivators would have lost their lives in such a confrontation. That meant his sect had free reign.

  Lu Qingshan dropped the spiritual earthworm into the soil. With his previous frenzied rush, he hadn't had the chance to thoroughly explore the secrets hiding inside this earth. There had to be something here. Something that made these trees grow so tall and large. The area was sizable, so the Seven Mysteries Gate was able to take the time to scope out the place in detail before the true excavation project began.

  Now that most of the danger had been solved, the Eight Thorns Spider was enough to keep the earthworm safe. It freed up Lu Qingshan to lead Li Fanghua and Song Lin down the tunnels to search for more spiritual items.

  “How far is it until you reach Heart Clarity?” he whispered to Li Fanghua.

  “Soon,” she whispered back. “I just need to consolidate some insights from that last battle and I’ll be ready.”

  “Good. You can return to the herb garden when we’re done searching this area.”

  With most of the stone cleared away, it was a breeze for them to find what objects actually mattered. They discovered another stone eye artifact hidden in the ceiling. Then, there were dozens of tightly enclosed stone boxes containing trace amounts of spirit qi. Only Qin Ye was able to open them at the moment. Lu Qingshan brought them away to the surface.

  The last thing they discovered was a large vein of spiritual metal, which Song Lin actually knew about. “Bloodgold Ore,” he muttered. “Our family has a mine.”

  Lu Qingshan was surprised to hear this. So that was why they had attracted the attention of an immortal cultivator. It turned out to be a mine. “What are its properties?” he asked.

  “Sharpness and durability. Self-repair of minor cracks by absorbing the blood of living beings. A higher conductivity for spiritual energy. The immortal said that mining enough means a low-level artifact can be created, but the Song family hasn’t been able to do so yet. Just constant tributes in exchange for some cultivation teachings.”

  Lu Qingshan nodded. It sounded useful. Strong martial artists who wanted to use weapons often had the critical problem that they tended to break. This was inevitable, and thus durability wasn’t the key benefit. Instead, it was the self-repair.

  “We’ll get people extracting that ore as well,” Lu Qingshan decided. “Relay my plans to everyone. Priority one: grow the spirit rice. Priority two, clear out this forest. There are some other ore veins to dig up, and the mountain peak too, but we can handle those later,” he said.

  The two of them nodded, then set off to perform their various tasks. To keep the spirit rice boxes secure, Li Fanghua immediately began to transfer some back. Lu Qingshan personally guarded her during this time.

  Afterwards, he returned to his martial arts practice. The Black Fury Inner Force was steadily climbing upwards. And so was the Hidden Veil Technique.