After leading Ren Tingting away from the small town, she looked at Qiu Xia and whispered, "Qiu Xia, don't you think you went a bit too far? You actually struck a Ghost Messenger. There's no way he'll let this go."
"He might be strong," Qiu Xia replied coolly. "If we truly traded blows, I might not necessarily win, let alone face the Underworld backing him. But as the saying goes, one doesn't live for a meal, but for one's pride.
I've stepped back again and again, yet that fellow refused to show me any respect. Since it's come to this, he shouldn't blame me for flipping the table. I can't stand this chaotic world anywayit's time I brought some order to it!"
"Tingting, you and Fengdie should head into the Small World first. Heal her eyes and tell her the truth about her father. She has a right to know. As for me, I have some housecleaning to do. Even ants shouldn't be stepped on whenever someone pleases."
After placing Ren Tingting and Fengdie into the Small World, Qiu Xia began his plan. It was a plan of absolute slaughter. If the Underworld thought they were so formidable, he would give them more work than they could handle.
As for interfering in the mortal realm, he didn't care whether the Celestials or some third-party power tried to stop him. As long as he didn't appear personally before them, his Golden Finger would shield him from any prying eyes or divination.
In the days that followed, Qiu Xia began a massive purge of bandits, corrupt merchants, and oppressive wealthy landlords. Every time he took a life, he left behind a single message. Furthermore, he utilized the unique properties of the 9-Tomoe Rinnegan to forcibly send these souls down to the Underworld, preventing them from lingering and causing trouble in the human world.
The message he left was simple: tell the Ghost Messengers that if the Underworld was so "impressive" and the soul reapers so "mighty," then they should come and drag him down themselves. If they didn't have the guts to face him, they could stay below and keep processing the influx.
The massive wave of souls being forcibly shoved into the Underworld caused a significant disruption to its order. Once the reason became clear, the Underworld officials and even Cha Cha were pushed to the breaking point. A mere low-level cultivator dared to challenge the Underworld? They demanded to find him and strike his name from the records to end his life.
However, when A Cha flipped through both the Yin and Yang volumes of the Book of Life and Death, she discovered the person didn't exist in the records at all. This meant one of two things:
either the man was using a disguise, or he had transcended the Three Realms and the Five Elements, reaching the rank of a Golden Immortal. If it was the former, it was manageable; if it was the latter, A Cha would have to take action personally.
She suspected the former was more likely. After all, if the man were a Golden Immortal, he wouldn't have needed to resort to a sneak attack to escape Zhao Li.
Due to the constraints of this world's power level, Qiu Xia's Three Radiance Divine Escape wasn't as fast as it had been in the worlds of One Piece or Naruto, where he could circle the planet a dozen times in a single day.
Nevertheless, it was still incredibly swift. He could travel from the northern lands of Lu to the southern reaches of Yue in a day. To prevent the Underworld from finding a pattern, Qiu Xia chose his targets randomly every day.
Though there were many powerful beings in this worldmany far stronger than Qiu Xiamost of the great cultivators were in secluded meditation. The Celestials found it inconvenient to descend to the mortal plane, and the Inspectors simply couldn't find his location.
Thus, every day across the land of Shenzhou, many were "cleansed" by Qiu Xia and sent to the Underworld. Those he killed weren't wasted; he extracted their blood before burning their remains to ash, preventing the dead from causing a plague.
Qiu Xia's reason for collecting their blood was simple: he was preparing a massive "gift" for the Underworld. By flooding the realm of the dead with souls, he kept the reapers constantly occupied. The sheer volume of evil ghosts required the Underworld's full suppression, meaning the Ghost Messengers couldn't even make it back up to the mortal world.
In the past, if the reapers stopped coming to collect souls, the human world would have fallen into chaos. But with Qiu Xia there, it wasn't an issue. Whether a ghost was good or evil, he took them away the moment he saw them. As for those he didn't see, he wasn't worried; the souls of the virtuous and the ordinary wouldn't turn into malevolent spirits overnight, and there were other Daoists and monks who could perform the rites of passing.
Qiu Xia's slaughter of warlords, the invading "devils," bandits, and the soldiers of the Eight-Nation Alliance naturally drew international attention. Various countries began dispatching supernatural experts to Shenzhou to deal with him.
However, because of the vast distances, it would take even the experts from Japan more than half a month to arrive. By the time they found him, Qiu Xia's preparations would be complete.
What were his preparations? Qiu Xia was no fool. He knew that a slaughter of this magnitudetens of thousands, sometimes over a hundred thousand lives a daywould eventually draw the ire of those in the Immortal Realms.
He achieved such high numbers in a short time primarily through Dōjutsu. While he could have used Star Daoist Arts, the resulting commotion would have been too great and drawn everyone to him too quickly.
During every operation, Qiu Xia would set up an array to isolate the surroundings and seal the heavens' secrets. Then, using his Dōjutsu, he would rip the souls out, devour the life force of their divine bodies, strip their blood, and burn them to ash before casting the ghosts into the Underworld.
When he encountered someone stronger than himself, he looked for opportunities to launch a sneak attack. If he couldn't win, he simply moved on to other targets. Thanks to his Golden Finger, he could sense them while they remained blind to him, allowing him to do as he pleased.
Over the course of three months, Qiu Xia cleared out seventy percent of the "scum" in Shenzhou and eradicated a mountain of demons and monsters. Beyond that, he secretly buried numerous array flags across the land. Finally, at the central point of Shenzhou, he placed a colossal array plate.
By the end of those three months, the excessive consumption of life force had left Qiu Xia shrouded in a towering malevolence. His eyes had turned a permanent, glowing crimson. Had it not been for the concealment of his Golden Finger and his cultivation techniques,
he likely would have been hunted down by self-righteous moralists long ago. Because the slaughter had begun to affect his mental state, he was forced to move the next phase of his plan forward before he had finished clearing all the monsters.
Staying at the foundation of his array, Qiu Xia merged all the fortune, faith, and the imperial aura of the dragon veins he had collected into the array plate.
With the preliminary work done, it was time to activate the grand array. Such an array required a staggering amount of energy. Previously, he could rely on the assistance of the Zombie Heavenly Dao, but he wasn't sure if it would help him this time.
He opted for a different method: strengthening his cultivation technique. The insights gained while reinforcing his technique would draw in a massive amount of stellar energy, which would serve to trigger the array.
Having made his decision, Qiu Xia first activated a protective array and then began the strengthening process. As the technique evolved, he fell into a deep state of insight. Above his location, the sky formed a literal funnel, pulling the sunlight of the surrounding area into the array.
Because he had layered multiple concealment arrays, he wasn't discovered during the day. However, once night fell, the starlight he channeled extended tens of thousands of miles beyond the array's borders. The sky full of starlight immediately caught the attention of the supernatural experts across the Three Realms and the land of Shenzhou.
But by then, it was too late. As the stellar energy was absorbed in massive quantities, the array plate activated. One by one, the buried array foundations began to hum, and barriers began to rise across the land of Shenzhou. In truth, these barriers weren't exceptionally strong; an expert from the Three Realms or even an ordinary Immortal could have broken them.
Yet, even though they could break them, none of them dared to. The reason was simple: Qiu Xia had prepared for every single contingency.
🚨 Note: Consider supporting this story on Patreon.com/kleinmoretti to access 100+ advance chapters and 2 new chapters daily! (Full story bundles also available without a subscription).