The city of Yuyang was located extremely far from the ruins of Anyuan City from years past.
Even with Han Li’s swift walking speed, it took him over half a year to finally return to the vicinity of the ruins of Anyuan City.
Along the way, he traversed mountains and valleys, deliberately choosing routes with more human activity. However, the distance between cities was simply too vast.
During the journey, he was still forced to kill numerous ordinary beasts and five or six low-level demonic creatures.
Of course, this was because Han Li was traveling alone through the wilderness.
If a large group of humans had been traveling together, these low-level demonic creatures likely wouldn’t have dared to attack.
The ruins of Anyuan City, unseen for so many years, remained largely unchanged from when he had left.
The broken walls and rubble stretched endlessly, now covered in a thick layer of dust.
Han Li stood nearby for a long while, unmoving, lost in thought.
His Vajra Arts had already reached the bottleneck of the seventh layer. Once he broke through this barrier, he could achieve full mastery of the seventh layer.
Truth be told, his progress had been much faster than originally anticipated.
This was partly due to the spiritual energy of the Spirit Realm being far denser than that of the human world, greatly enhancing the effects of spiritual energy infusion. Additionally, his body had been transformed by various spiritual medicines and rare fruits, pushing his physical talents far beyond the limits of ordinary humans.
Back when he had followed the man surnamed Qin and others into the demonic beast’s lair, his experience and abilities allowed him to easily obtain the Blood Yin Mushroom.
Overjoyed, the members of the Golden Jade Sect immediately drafted a joint recommendation letter for him to enter the Nine Mysterious Jade Pool. After retrieving their jade pendants, they happily returned to their sect.
After parting ways with the cultivators, Han Li decided not to return to Madam Fang, feeling that he had already drawn too much attention at the Tian Dong Trading Company. Instead, he planned to blend into another human city.
After all, the blood oath document held no power over him.
His destination was naturally Yuyang City, one of the nearest cities—a place highly revered by body refiners, which would greatly benefit his cultivation. As for the black phoenix demoness who had given him the short sword token and the names and locations while controlling the corpse, Han Li naturally no longer trusted any of it.
The moment he left the demoness, he destroyed the sword.
On the way to Yuyang City, while consolidating his fifth-layer cultivation, he was ambushed by several demonic beasts.
Though he killed them, he soon suffered a backlash from the Vajra Arts, causing his cultivation to plummet dangerously close to falling back a level.
At that critical moment, he encountered the now-small merchant Fatty Fan, who happened to be carrying a rare elixir that saved him.
Grateful and in need of someone to conceal his presence, Han Li followed Fatty Fan back to Yuyang City. Over time, he secretly helped expand the merchant’s auction house into what it was today.
As for crafting spirit tools, with his mastery of formations and the insights of a Deity Transformation cultivator, producing high-quality items was effortless with just a little practice.
He stayed in Yuyang City for decades.
During that time, he left once when he encountered the bottleneck of the sixth layer.
After a year or so, he found the Golden Jade Sect’s mountain gate and the brocade-robed man, who had since advanced to Core Formation.
Seeing that Han Li’s Vajra Arts had reached the peak of the fifth layer, allowing him to match a Core Formation cultivator with sheer physical strength, the man surnamed Qin was shocked but kept his promise, arranging for Han Li to soak in the Nine Mysterious Jade Pool.
With the pool’s miraculous power, he broke through the sixth-layer bottleneck in just a few days, saving over a decade of arduous cultivation.
After returning to Yuyang City and cultivating in seclusion for another twenty years, he encountered the current bottleneck of the seventh layer.
To break through this final barrier, he couldn’t rely on slow, conventional methods in the city. He decided to use the most common approach among body refiners—venturing into dangerous wilderness to slay powerful demonic beasts and forcefully impact the bottleneck.
However, this meant traveling far away, possibly never returning to this region. Thus, he planned to retrieve all the treasures he had buried in the Green Sand Desert.
With his current body refinement skills, he could generally protect himself, so it was wiser to carry his treasures with him.
After resting briefly at the ruins of Anyuan City, Han Li set off again, heading straight for the Green Sand Desert.
Over a month later, Han Li stepped onto the grayish-green sands and ventured deeper.
But before long, his expression grew uneasy, and he began to feel alarmed.
The desert was eerily silent.
Apart from the howling wind and sand, there were no other sounds. None of the birds that should have been in the sky were present, and even the usual insects and scorpions on the ground were nowhere to be seen.
It was as if the entire Green Sand Desert had become a lifeless wasteland.
Han Li’s face showed surprise as he heightened his vigilance, heading straight for where he had buried his storage pouch.
Though desert terrain often shifted, Han Li had taken precautions when burying his treasures, ensuring he could locate them without using spiritual power.
Ten days later, when Han Li arrived at a certain spot in the desert, he was stunned by a massive, hazy white object looming ahead.
It was a crystal-like exoskeleton of a giant insect!
The shell had six pairs of translucent wings, each over ten feet long, and its body resembled an enormous centipede, magnified countless times.
“Six-Winged Frost Centipede? How is this possible? How could it evolve so quickly?” Han Li stared at the colossal shell in shock.
He walked over and circled it several times before flicking his sleeve, sending out a streak of silver light.
With a soft *clang*, the silver light struck the crystalline shell and bounced off—revealing itself to be a gleaming silver rope.
This was the peculiar weapon Han Li had commissioned years ago, crafted from the tendons of a flood dragon. Over the decades, it had aided him in countless battles against beasts and enemies. Even after mastering spirit tool crafting, Han Li hadn’t modified it—partly because his body refinement had advanced to the point where ordinary spirit tools were of little use, and partly because he had grown accustomed to its handling.
Even so, when propelled by his immense strength, the rope’s strike was comparable to that of a low-grade magic tool. The fact that the shell remained unscathed spoke volumes about its toughness.
Truly worthy of a Six-Winged Frost Centipede that had evolved to maturity!
Han Li scanned the surroundings, puzzled.
There had been twelve four-winged centipedes, so why was there only one shell? Where were the other eleven?
“Could it be…?” A thought flashed through Han Li’s mind, and his expression shifted slightly.
At that moment, a strange howl echoed from the distance, followed by rolling thunder. Dark clouds surged on one side of the horizon, accompanied by flashes of lightning and fierce winds.
Watching the celestial phenomenon, Han Li’s lips twitched, and his eyes narrowed.
Though he couldn’t release his divine sense, the faint spiritual connection was unmistakable—hidden within the distant storm was one of his spirit insects, a Six-Winged Frost Centipede!
Yet, in that brief moment of connection, it felt… unfamiliar.
The fact that the centipede, now a mature six-winged form, could summon wind and rain—a heaven-and-earth-level ability—left Han Li dumbfounded.
This suggested the centipede could freely manipulate the world’s spiritual energy, possibly even surpassing its master in cultivation, nearing the peak of Deity Transformation.
Just as Han Li was grappling with disbelief, a loud buzzing erupted. From the opposite side of the sky, a vast, multicolored mist suddenly appeared, racing toward the dark clouds.
Upon closer inspection, Han Li paled.
Within the mist were swarms of winged scorpions, each the size of a palm, their colorful bodies filling half the sky.
Even more alarming was the colossal scorpion king at the center—over twenty zhang long, wingless but levitated by a cloud of vibrant poison mist. Its massive stinger, glowing with eerie green light, arched high above its body.
Han Li inhaled sharply.
But upon closer scrutiny, he realized the “scorpion king” was actually an amalgamation of tens of thousands of smaller scorpions.
Countless flying scorpions had clustered together, forming this monstrous entity through sheer numbers.
Before Han Li could process this, a fierce wind howled from the dark clouds, revealing the monstrous head of a snow-white centipede, over ten zhang long.
At the same time, his previously faint spiritual connection suddenly sharpened.
His expression shifted as a realization struck him:
“So that’s it!”
This Six-Winged Frost Centipede contained the spiritual imprints of all twelve four-winged centipedes—either fused into one or having devoured the others.
Thus, this single mature Six-Winged Frost Centipede had been born!
But where had these flying scorpions come from? Had the Tian Dong Trading Company’s caravan encountered them back then, they would have been annihilated without a trace.
As Han Li pondered this, the dark clouds and colorful mist collided in the distance.
Screeches and buzzing filled the air as countless scorpions were frozen solid by gusts of icy wind, shattering into crystalline fragments that rained down from the sky.
Meanwhile, the scorpions’ venomous mist corroded parts of the dark clouds, continuing its relentless advance.
Soon, the clouds thinned, revealing more of the snow-white centipede’s colossal form.
Tai Sui Yellow Amulet Paper FuLu Taoist Love Talisman Traditional Chinese Spiritual Charm Attracting Love Protecting Marriage