Thump! Thump! Thump!
The heavy thumping of her heart echoed within the sealed stone chamber for a long time before gradually settling down.
The dark-gold blood qi flowed through Su Yueli's thick veins like mercury.
She opened her eyes and exhaled a breath of turbid air.
The white jet of air struck the dark iron rock wall directly, boring a hole three inches deep before finally dispersing.
This was the thirtieth year of her seclusion.
Yet, she had no intention of standing up.
Su Yueli glanced at the empty shell of the Ninth Realm demonic leech core in front of her, which had already turned to ash, and then peered inward to inspect the dark-gold, flawless golden bones beneath her flesh.
Her physical defense at the early stage of the Heaven-Shaking Realm had completely locked onto the threshold of absolute great perfection.
Cultivation was a highly rigorous process.
Now that her foundation was established, what followed was a matter of slow, patient tempering.
Su Yueli closed her eyes once more, sinking back into a silent state of Ascetic Meditation.
This single sitting lasted for another thirty years.
In total, sixty years had passed.
During these sixty long years, the situation in the outside world had undergone earth-shattering changes.
On the border, a brutal immortal war had erupted between the Great Li Dynasty and the Great Wei Dynasty, lasting for decades.
The cause was quite simple: a medium-sized high-grade spirit stone vein had been unearthed on the border of Great Li.
For the sect ancestors of both sides whose lifespans were nearing their end and who desperately needed resources to cling to life, this was nothing short of a piece of fat meat dangled before hungry wolves.
To contest ownership of the mineral vein, both sides poured out almost all of their forces.
High in the sky, immortal light blotted out the heavens as high-grade magic treasures clashed in a frenzied exchange.
In a sect war of this scale, spanning tens of thousands of miles, the low-level loose cultivators of the First, Second, Third, and even Fourth Realms were reduced to nothing but undignified cannon fodder.
They were forcibly driven into battle in massive waves by high-level cultivators using battle arrays.
The disciples of many small sects were pulverized into bloody mist by the shockwaves of stray magic treasures flying through the air before they could even fully unleash their spiritual energy.
On the front lines of the Great Wei blood-armored guards and the Great Li sects, countless cultivators perished daily, leaving the wasteland piled high with corpses.
When the grand protective arrays of the major sects were activated, they drained the flesh, blood, and spiritual energy of thousands of low-level cultivators daily, leaving them utterly crippled on the spot.
On this scorched earth littered with the wreckage of magic treasures and severed limbs, the lives of mortals and low-level cultivators became cheaper than weeds.
Yet, no matter how brutal the slaughter raged outside, the interior of the Spiritless Dead Valley remained as silent as death.
There was not even a trace of spiritual energy here, and any cultivator who entered would instantly lose more than half of their strength. As a result, even loose cultivators seeking refuge avoided this place.
This underground stone chamber deep within the ten-thousand-fathom abyss had instead become the safest isolated island on the Great Li border.
Su Yueli breathed calmly in the darkness. No matter how the mortal world changed outside, her Dao Heart remained entirely undisturbed.
In the sixtieth year of her cultivation, the depths of the sea of blood qi within her body was the first to experience signs of qualitative change.
It was the mutated Martial Soul inside her dantian.
Years ago, in the main burial chamber of the Myriad Bones Wasteland, this Martial Soul had swallowed whole the remnant soul of that peak Twelfth Realm grand cultivator from the Tianyuan Sect.
A Twelfth Realm grand cultivator was an existence that nearly touched the ceiling of this world's laws.
Even if only a wisp of a remnant soul remained, the soul laws and resentment contained within it were monstrously vast.
For the past sixty years, Su Yueli's mutated Martial Soul had acted like a giant grindstone, tirelessly grinding, strangling, and digesting this violent soul energy day and night using her martial blood qi.
Only today was this tough bone finally completely crushed and devoured.
Boom!
Deep within Su Yueli's sea of consciousness, a gold-red tempest suddenly erupted.
The jet-black armored Martial Soul, originally a hundred Zhang tall and covered in ferocious spikes, began to emit a harsh, grinding screech after chewing and swallowing the very last fragment of the Twelfth Realm remnant soul.
Its body did not expand further; instead, it began to compress inward frantically.
From a height of a hundred Zhang, it shrank in an incredibly short time to fifty Zhang, then ten Zhang, and finally compressed down to the size of an ordinary adult.
The Martial Soul's form was undergoing a drastic transformation.
The wild spikes that previously represented bloodlust and violence completely melted away under the washing of the pure soul power.
The resulting gold-red liquid flowed across the surface of the black armor, ultimately imprinting itself as dense, dark-gold patterns that exuded an ancient and profound aura.
Its eyes no longer flickered with crimson demonic fire, but instead turned into bottomless black holes.
The entire Martial Soul stood quietly upon the surface of the dark-gold sea of blood qi, without emitting the slightest trace of violence. Even all signs of life had completely vanished from it.
Now, it looked like a suit of armor carved from black jade, completely devoid of life.
Yet, Su Yueli felt a lethal threat during her internal inspection.
She tentatively extended a wisp of her martial divine sense toward this Martial Soul.
However, the moment that wisp of sense touched the surface of the Martial Soul's armor, it failed to create even a single ripple before being instantly assimilated and devoured, vanishing without a trace.
Absolute nothingness.
Having devoured the Twelfth Realm remnant soul, the mutated Martial Soul had completely evolved at this moment into a “Void Bodyguard” specifically designed to counter a cultivator's divine sense.
With just a thought from Su Yueli, this bodyguard could hide completely within the shadow of her blood qi.
Should any high-level cultivator attempt to probe her with their divine sense, possess her body, or launch a sneak attack with soul-type spells, they would be swallowed up like a snack by this Martial Soul the instant they made contact.
The strength of this bodyguard had taken a massive leap forward.
Immediately after, a surge of pure, flawless soul origin power backflowed from the Martial Soul, pouring directly into Su Yueli's sea of consciousness.
This power contained no spiritual energy, nor was it physical blood qi; it was the purest form of mental will.
Rumble...
It was as if ten thousand bolts of thunder flashed through Su Yueli's mind. Under the washing of this pure soul power, the mental fatigue and suppression brought about by thirty years of shattering her bones vanished without a trace in an instant.
Her martial mental will directly tore through the mortal limits at this moment.
In this profound mental state, she could even clearly see the tiniest bone patterns on the dark-gold bones within her body, and trace the trajectory of every single speck of dust floating in the air of the black-gold stone chamber.
A cultivator's divine sense had to be actively projected outward, which inevitably caused fluctuations in spiritual energy and made it easy for powerful enemies to detect.
Su Yueli's mental will, however, was in an absolute, flawless state of empty clarity.
She did not project it outward, yet her will was like an invisible mountain, firmly locked within three Zhang of her body.
With this force field of will, even if she did not summon her fist blade Xiaohei, she could shatter the sea of consciousness of ordinary Seventh and Eighth Realm cultivators in an instant with just this tangible pressure of Ji Dao Will, turning them into fools on the spot.
Su Yueli took a deep breath and began to calmly calculate her next steps.
No matter how brutally the immortal war raged outside, it was merely low-level cultivators acting as cannon fodder and throwing their lives away for the high-level sect ancestors.
Those old fogies who had lived for thousands of years claimed to be acting for the sake of the human orthodox path, but in reality, they were more calculating than anyone. They were on the verge of dying of old age, so they had no choice but to fight.
As for her, she walked the path of physical longevity.
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