Lu Yu didn’t touch the items left behind after Yang Xiu turned to ash, not even taking the Red Fire Sword, leaving them all in the Sealed Demon Forbidden Area, fearing there were tracking marks left by secret techniques.
Lu Yu wouldn’t do anything that might leave future troubles for himself, besides, he didn’t fancy anything on Yang Xiu, except for the third-grade spiritual weapon, the Red Fire Sword.
"Is it over?" Yu Xiaoman asked upon hearing Lu Yu’s footsteps.
Glancing at the already disintegrated Yang Xiu, Lu Yu nodded in satisfaction, "It’s over, he’s gone."
"Did he admit defeat?" Yu Xiaoman was speaking when she accidentally saw the severed arm lying in the distance.
"Ugh~ Urgh~" Yu Xiaoman bent over and vomited sour water.
Lu Yu rubbed the back of his head, glanced at the distant severed arm, and remembered only to put away the Silent Shadow Concealment Array, forgetting to deal with a severed arm...
"Did you kill someone?" Yu Xiaoman, looking a bit pale, asked Lu Yu in horror.
In her mind, fighting monsters was a normal operation, especially since they were already dead skeleton monsters.
However, killing someone was a bit unacceptable. After experiencing the game these few days, she felt that everyone around her was very real, real people.
She couldn’t bring herself to kill a person.
Lu Yu looked into Yu Xiaoman’s eyes, but Yu Xiaoman’s eyes dodged, daring not to meet Lu Yu’s gaze. He said seriously, "Let me tell you something."
Yu Xiaoman instinctively asked, "What is it?"
"In the game, if you die, you die in reality too," Lu Yu said emotionlessly.
Yu Xiaoman looked at him in fear, stammering, "You...you’re lying to me...right!"
"Why would I lie to you?" Lu Yu asked back, and Yu Xiaoman stammered, unable to speak. Right! Why would he lie about this?
"Whether it’s true, you can try in reality, you’ll find you possess some of the game’s powers."
Yu Xiaoman looked bewildered, wanting to log off, but got a prompt saying "Currently in a dangerous area, unable to log off, forced log off will result in unforeseen consequences."
She dared not attempt a forced log off; the unknown consequences were the most terrifying.
"You need to learn to adapt. Killing is a normal thing in this world; if you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you. Honestly, your performance disappoints me a bit," Lu Yu said flatly.
Yu Xiaoman lowered her head, not daring to look at Lu Yu.
"This is already the second time you’ve seen a corpse, and this time it’s much less horrific than the last, yet your reaction hasn’t improved at all," Lu Yu recalled his first time killing someone.
At the time, he thought it was a game, although the feeling of killing was very real and the corpse was very real, subconsciously thinking it was just a very realistic game, which reduced a lot of mental pressure.
He performed well, basically not losing combat effectiveness due to the first killing, later seeing someone beaten to pieces made him vomit. After vomiting, he felt much lighter and quickly accepted killing humanoid creatures.
Lu Yu looked at Yu Xiaoman and said, "To train your courage, to help you survive better in this world, and calmly face crises, go pick up that severed arm."
Hearing Lu Yu’s words, Yu Xiaoman raised her head to glance at Lu Yu, then lowered it, shaking her head constantly, "I won’t go, I won’t go..."
"Suit yourself, choose to pick up the severed arm, or choose to stay here alone."
Lu Yu walked towards the stone platform, intending to retrieve the knife embedded in it, realizing that Yang Xiu seemed to have come for this knife.
"Stay here alone", echoed in Yu Xiaoman’s mind; what she dreaded still happened, being left by the master in such a ghastly place.
If it were before, she might just complain about Lu Yu leaving her behind, but now knowing that dying in the game means real death, fear filled her heart.
Being left alone will truly lead to death!
Although she wasn’t sure if Lu Yu’s statement was true or not, she didn’t dare to gamble. Looking at the distant severed arm, tears welled up in Yu Xiaoman’s eyes, why did she have to do such things? She was just a weak girl, why?
Looking at Lu Yu’s back, Yu Xiaoman almost cried, oh no! She was already crying, tears streaming down, just not making a sound yet.
She was just an ordinary girl, why did she have to do such a thing?
Yu Xiaoman kept complaining, but her feet moved, compared to the challenge of Lu Yu’s "death" being true or false, picking up a severed arm seemed incomparable.
Hesitating for a long while, she finally walked to the severed arm, glanced at it, did some more hesitating, and then took a rope out of her backpack, tied up the severed arm, and cautiously carried it towards Lu Yu without touching it.
Avoiding the arm from touching her body, scared of the blood splattering on her, even more frightened if the fingers on the arm might suddenly move; after all, there were moving bones outside, the hands moving didn’t seem impossible.
Thinking , Yu Xiaoman’s pressure increased, looking at the fingers on the severed arm, it seemed they could move at any moment.
Lu Yu attempted to pull out the sword embedded in the stone platform, but it was stuck too tightly to budge. He even tried heating it with fire and then rapidly cooling it with ice, using the principle of thermal expansion and contraction to withdraw the sword.
Unfortunately, the sword seemed to have grown into the stone platform—it had no effect at all, which defied the laws of physics.
Staring at the sword embedded in the stone platform, Lu Yu was troubled. Glancing at the platform, a flash of inspiration struck his mind—perhaps he could do it this way!
He took out the Spirit Pearl, deploying Earth Evasion Technique, spreading its glow onto the sword, using it to extract the sword. After all, the stone platform is considered a part of "earth," which Earth Evasion can penetrate.
The glow of Earth Evasion spread slowly over the sword, seeming to encounter great resistance, but it persisted and extended downward. As the glow infiltrated the blade beneath the platform, Lu Yu suddenly saw what lay beneath the stone.
Under normal circumstances, one wouldn’t see what was within the soil while using Earth Evasion, yet Lu Yu did.
No, it shouldn’t be said that he saw it, but rather he sensed it.
Under the stone platform was an extremely dense demonic aura, so intense that as the Earth Evasion glow contacted it, Lu Yu experienced hallucinations, feeling he saw the scene below.
It was a humanoid demon, over three meters tall. Its body was in ruin, with arms suspended, head drooping, exuding a terrifying demonic aura that didn’t fluctuate, hinting it might have lost its vitality.
Although the demon’s face wasn’t visible, its form was ferociously sinister. Lu Yu hesitated about whether to pull out the sword, as it seemed the sword was used to suppress the demon below.
During his hesitation, Lu Yu felt something watching him. Instinctively looking down, he was horrified.
The demon had unknowingly raised its head, its hollow black eye sockets staring at Lu Yu.
Without hesitation, Lu Yu severed his connection with the Spirit Pearl, abandoning the thought of extracting the sword.
He gave up on pulling out the sword, but it started to grow upward segment by segment. The demonic aura pushed against the sword in Lu Yu’s hand, taking advantage of the time when it was enveloped by Earth Evasion glow to forcibly rise.
Goosebumps rose all over Lu Yu’s body; he felt a chill down his spine. Seeing the unfavorable situation, he gritted his teeth and re-established his connection with the Spirit Pearl.
Whoosh! Lu Yu withdrew the sword, and a terrifying demonic aura gushed out from the breach.
"Master, I brought the severed arm..."
Lu Yu interrupted her, grabbing the severed arm from her hands, activating the Heaven-shattering Blast, and throwing it toward the breach. The Earth Evasion glow spread from his body onto Yu Xiaoman, and soon she was enveloped within it.
With one step, Lu Yu broke through the ground, soil spraying everywhere, shattering any equipment fragments that could obstruct their descent, pulling Yu Xiaoman deep into the earth.
The explosion caused a momentary pause in the black mist emerging from the breach. Subsequently, even more and greater amounts of black mist surged forth. After a thunderous roar, the stone platform, on which Lu Yu couldn’t leave any trace, exploded. A terrifying figure floated up, enshrouded by the black mist.
Not looking at Lu Yu who was desperately fleeing underground, the demon general gazed skyward. An enormous cloud of demonic aura had already formed in the sky, every skeleton on the ancient battlefield still capable of moving provided a share of power to the black cloud.
As the black mist was drawn away, skeletons fell one after another, collapsing into heaps of bones, drained of power.
The demon general opened a mouth brimming with fangs, inhaling, the demonic aura forming the black cloud continually surged into its body. The demon general’s aura was visibly growing stronger...
Underground, Lu Yu, frantically fleeing with Yu Xiaoman, didn’t even have time for her to guide him, the only direction was to get as far as possible from the demon general behind them.
He realized he had made a monumental mistake and now just wanted to escape the scene of the incident.
As Lu Yu fled, several powerful presences rushed toward the demon general’s location, all sensing its terrifying aura.
The ground constantly swelled, as a gigantic black centipede burrowed out and headed toward the demon general. A woman stood on its head. If Yu Xiaoman were present, she’d surely recognize her teacher, Ling Yuyan.
"Hurry, we’re too slow," Ling Yuyan stomped on the giant centipede beneath her feet.
The demonic aura around the centipede quivered, producing a voice, "If you think I’m slow, you can go on your own first."
"That’s not possible, I’m definitely not a match for that great demon," Ling Yuyan confessed frankly. She sighed, "Who would’ve thought that after being suppressed for centuries, it still wouldn’t be dead. Truly terrifying!"
"I really don’t understand you humans, why leave such a great demon be instead of destroying it?" The demonic aura surrounding the centipede vibrated, producing a voice.
"If it was so easy to destroy, it wouldn’t have been chosen to suppress instead back in the day. For that, several Core Formation experts in my human race were killed or wounded," Ling Yuyan recollected records she’d seen about the historical Kugu Ridge ancient battlefield.
Back then, to eliminate demons appearing within the Kugu Ridge area, a peak Core Formation realm general led several Core Formation leaders and tens of thousands of troops to slaughter all the demons within the Kugu Ridge area, preventing them from spreading outside.
In that battle, the participating troops were almost wiped out, and the crippled demon general was suppressed by the Core Formation realm peak general within the Sealed Demon Forbidden Area of Kugu Ridge’s inner domain.
To this day, every year Beifeng Academy sends students to clear away soldiers’ remains contaminated with demonic aura, diminishing the residual demon qi to the greatest extent.
Within Kugu Ridge, monsters and humans reached an agreement; humans wouldn’t siege them, in return, they would resist the Kugu Ridge inner domain soldiers’ remains, contaminated with demonic aura, from leaving Kugu Ridge.
Not just the giant centipede and Ling Yuyan were rushing to the Sealed Demon Forbidden Area, but several other great demon figures as well.