Li Yan immediately confirmed that his guess was correct.
The fall of a Nascent Soul cultivator, even for a super sect like the "Sacred Demon Palace," was extremely painful.
It was estimated that without three to five years or more, this matter would not pass so quickly. If the "Sacred Demon Palace" did not get the results it needed, it would not let go easily.
Thus, in the following days, Li Yan chose to lie low and began closed-door cultivation...
Cultivators came and went in the "Sacred Demon City" every day. Some came and never left, some left and disappeared forever...
Spring comes and flowers bloom, autumn winds sweep the leaves, white clouds and grey dogs—all just a fleeting glimpse of time...
In a flash, ten years had passed. Mu Guyue sat in her garden.
Her lower abdomen was already high and round. She looked at the various flowers in the garden, swaying gently in the wind.
She gently caressed her lower abdomen, her long fingers slowly drawing irregular lines through her black long dress. In her eyes, however, flashed the scene of another Spirit Plant Garden.
The lifespan of the Demon Clan was long. Even a mortal could live for one or two hundred years without any problem.
Therefore, even mortal demon women did not carry their children for ten months, but could only give birth after a year of pregnancy.
Once a mortal of the Demon Clan stepped onto the immortal path and became a cultivator, they would from then on walk a path against the heavens.
So under the rules of heaven and earth, it was already very difficult to have bloodline descendants.
The time they gestated a fetus would be even longer, and it would be more prone to miscarriage, usually taking ten years.
Ever since Mu Guyue returned to her clan from the "Demon-Swallowing Abyss," although her injuries had recovered, she often brooded over the scene that had once happened.
At that time, after a period of confusion, she had escaped from that sliver of affection and would often feel a boundless killing intent rise in her heart.
She no longer had any reluctance towards Li Yan. She only wanted to find this person and kill him immediately, or refine him into a senseless puppet to keep by her side.
Every time she thought of that man running rampant on her body, Mu Guyue would always feel an inexplicable nausea, a sense of her own filth.
She was of the noble bloodline of the Demon Clan, while that person was just a weak, frail human, fit only to be enslaved by other races.
Her filth had to be washed away with the other's blood to relieve her own humiliation.
It was just that even with her status, wanting to find a human cultivator in the vast territory of the White Demon Clan was a task with no certainty.
And the result was indeed so. She had sent out many trusted subordinates to inquire with jade slips carved with Li Yan's appearance, but in the end, she had not received any useful information.
She had even used secret channels to search in the "Sacred Demon City" where cultivators gathered, but still had not received a reply that pleased her.
All of this was due to Li Yan's low profile. Even though he had fought with Jiao Wuxing on the streets of the "Sacred Demon City," he had only shown his face once.
Afterwards, every time he went out, Li Yan would deliberately conceal himself, not letting others notice him.
Mu Guyue spent a year in anger. And a year later, during a cultivation session, she found that there was a problem with her body.
She actually found a trace of life in her body. Startled, she probed with her Divine Sense and immediately understood the reason.
At that time, Mu Guyue was even more furious. How could she be pregnant with the bloodline of a human cultivator?
Immediately, her Divine Sense swept over in a rage, wanting to directly shatter that newly born and awakened life.
But when her Divine Sense swept over, that life, which was not even the size of a fingernail, actually transmitted a sense of joy to her.
And from this tiny bit of life, she also felt a vigorous power, and a feeling of being connected to her own bloodline.
For a moment, Mu Guyue's soaring killing intent was actually extinguished by more than half. But in the depths of her heart, a voice was constantly berating her.
"Kill it, kill it! This is the evil spawn of an inferior bloodline. Kill it, quickly kill it!"
She gritted her silver teeth, and several times she stirred her Spirit Power, wanting to shatter the other. But the waves of joy coming from her Divine Sense made it impossible for her killing intent to condense into a needle.
A sense of protection that she herself found extremely absurd arose in her heart.
Once this emotion appeared, Mu Guyue became even more hesitant. This hesitation lasted for several days.
In the end, she still remembered the appearance of that hateful human cultivator on her body, and her own coyness as she took and delighted in him. This caused Mu Guyue's killing intent to rise again.
She closed her eyes, and once again directed her Divine Sense towards her abdomen, intending to kill it with one blow, without any more hesitation.
The moment her Divine Sense penetrated her lower abdomen, she froze in astonishment. In just a few days, that life aura had grown several times stronger.
Apart from its size not changing much, the moment her Divine Sense descended, the other, as if it had sensed it, actually began to beat even more joyfully in her abdomen.
In Mu Guyue's Divine Sense, it was as if she had heard a "yee-ya" sound.
In this seemingly illusory sound, her cold arrogance, her heartlessness turned into a piece of confusion and helplessness...
Afterwards, Mu Guyue went to that deep sea several more times, but even at her peak, she was still unable to break open the sub-cave residence named "Celestial Spirit Grotto."
Every time she went, she would guard there for a period of time, but that human cultivator's aura never appeared again...
The flowers before Mu Guyue's eyes were suddenly blown by a gust of wind, and in their swaying, her thoughts were pulled back from the distant past.
Her hand was still gently caressing her abdomen, her long fingers occasionally winding lightly.
This life had that person's bloodline. One day, when she advanced to the Spirit Transformation stage, she could use the fetus's essence blood to search the heavens and the earth to find that human, and then personally slaughter him.
Mu Guyue had not been out for several years. Apart from cultivating, she would just sit quietly like this, occasionally subconsciously probing the fetus in her abdomen with her Divine Sense.
Her not appearing in the clan also aroused no suspicion.
Let alone a cultivator not showing up for ten years, it was a normal thing for them not to appear in front of people for fifty or a hundred years. Especially for a Nascent Soul cultivator, it was a very normal thing to be in seclusion for several hundred years.
Today, the fetus in her cultivation kicked even more fiercely, disturbing her so much that she had to hastily end her breathing exercises.
Counting the time, it should be just a few days away from giving birth.
"Has it been ten years? Human brat, you'd better not be dead!"
Mu Guyue said softly. At this moment, her mood was abnormally complex.
In ten years, the fetus in her Divine Sense had grown day by day, and her thinking had also slowly changed along with the changes in the fetus.
The plan she had made back then, did she really still want to do it now? To use this child's essence blood to track down that human cultivator!
As she thought, Mu Guyue's Divine Sense naturally sank into the beating life aura in her abdomen again. Some of her obsessions were still there, but she herself had not noticed that they had faded somewhat...
Flowing clouds and passing winds, coming together from the horizon, and then returning to the other end of the horizon. Another thirty years passed in a hurry.
On this day, in a certain courtyard in the "Sacred Demon City," a room suddenly flashed with a violent light several times. The house also shook with it. After a few breaths, it slowly returned to normal.
Not long after, the door of that room opened gently, and a somewhat stale aura rushed out from the room.
Following that, a figure walked out slowly from the room.
He looked up at the sky. Through the dense leaves of the trees, patches of sunlight fell, shining on his body, making him unconsciously narrow his eyes.
He wore a green robe, and his long black hair fell down, covering most of his face.
Even though this person was very tall, his long black hair still dragged on the ground.
His long, thick black hair was scattered in front of his forehead. Between the gaps in his hair, his half-closed eyes slowly adapted to the light. A breath later, they returned to normal. They were a pair of pitch-black eyes, as bright as stardust.
The green-robed man looked at the sky above the dense, sky-covering leaves, and took a deep breath of the Spiritual Energy of heaven and earth. A black, ethereal light suddenly flickered on his body.
With a "bang," a ball of qi erupted from his body, blowing the few large trees in the courtyard into a frenzy of swaying branches and leaves. The dust on the ground exploded into the sky.
The next moment, the green-robed man raised a hand. With a roll and a push of his large sleeve, he threw out all the smoke and dust that had just filled the air.
In an instant, the courtyard returned to a clear and bright scene.
And at this moment, this person's long hair had already disappeared, leaving only short hair as black as ink, like a monk who had returned to secular life for a month.
With his long hair gone, an ordinary face was revealed. A pair of pitch-black eyes gave him an appearance that was ordinary, yet as deep as the sea, making it impossible for others to look directly at him.
This person was precisely Li Yan, who had been in seclusion for several decades.
At this time, his appearance had not changed at all compared to forty years ago.
The Spirit Power fluctuations on his body were almost non-existent. Apart from his deep eyes, he looked more and more like a mortal standing there.
He looked around. Everything was the same as it had been decades ago. With the formation in the courtyard operating, there was no deep accumulation of dust or miscellaneous leaves.
Li Yan walked slowly to a large tree in the courtyard and sat down on a stone bench.
For forty years, he had entered the room and had never gone out.
Before he went into seclusion, he had instructed Su Yuan to do two things. One was that if his seclusion exceeded nine years, then he was to use a small teleportation formation to send a jade bottle to the Sect Master, Xing Ming.
The jade bottle was sealed by him with Spirit Power, so Su Yuan would definitely not be able to open it.
Li Yan had left a total of six jade bottles. He had requested that as long as he did not come out of seclusion, Su Yuan was to teleport one jade bottle back to the sect every nine years.
If all six jade bottles were used up, he could come and try to wake him.
Li Yan had left two antidotes in each jade bottle, both for Shuang Wuyan. Adding the ones he had given to Xing Ming before, that was a total of seventy years.
Li Yan felt that it should be enough. By then, he should also be out of seclusion.
He had not let Su Yuan send all the antidotes to Xing Ming at once. Although Xing Ming was a shrewd person, Li Yan had always been even more meticulous in his work.
After Shuang Wuyan had stayed in the "Falling Star Valley" for a long time and had become familiar with everything, it was still better to be on guard.
The other matter was that he had requested that the pavilion room where he had originally lived should not be given to anyone else.
Su Yuan was to go and check every once in a while to see if any voice transmission talismans had appeared.
If there were, they had to be sent over immediately, even if it meant disturbing his cultivation.
Because the positioning of Zhao Min's voice transmission talisman back then was that location. Later, he had never been able to contact Zhao Min again, so it was impossible to change the location.
Regarding Li Yan's arrangements, Su Yuan was an old hand. He didn't ask the reasons at all and just did as he was told.
Li Yan sat on the stone bench, thinking. This time, he had already finished refining the last drop of the "Undead Nether Phoenix" essence blood, but he had not reached the estimated late-stage Golden Core realm.
This was also beyond Li Yan's expectations. He had broken through to the mid-stage Golden Core at around the seventh year of his seclusion, and then had spent a lot of time stabilizing it.
In the remaining time, he continued to refine the remaining power of the essence blood, and at the same time cultivated the "True Scripture of Gui Water" painstakingly. In the end, he still failed to break through to the late-stage Golden Core and was stuck in a bottleneck period.
The "Qiongqi Purgatory Art" had also reached the peak of the third layer, and could not advance another inch.
His current physical body was at least twice as strong as it had been forty years ago. At that time, Li Yan's physical body was already on par with a Pseudo-Nascent Soul cultivator in a head-on clash.
Now, if he were to face the "Dragon Flood Dragon Elder" from back then again, and the two were to fight with only their physical bodies, Li Yan would easily tear him into several pieces.
Of course, this was in a head-on clash without any tricks. If the other party used arts and poison, then Li Yan might not necessarily be able to win so easily.