This Young Master is not Cannon Fodder

The clue that led them to discovering the Demon Clan’s plot came not from chasing Jiaohu or Donghai Longzi, but from the unranked realm the two sides first discovered Jiaohu’s traces. As time passed, both the Immortal Court and Numinous Sword Sect felt as if the black dragon was purposely leading them on, hiding a dark secret. So, they retraced their steps and focused on unearthing any clues they overlooked.

Sure enough, they discovered something.

The unranked realm was a world filled with an excess of metal qi, causing the Law of Metal to be especially prominent. The excess metal qi naturally caused many mineral veins to form underground. Although most of the metal was common, like iron or aluminum, a rare metal had been formed deep inside the earth.

Its name was Bloodguide Bronze.

The reason why it had taken so long to discover this was because the demons did not directly dig into the Bloodguide Bronze vein, but used the toad dragon’s innate ability to mine the metal. They also almost mined all of the Bloodguide Bronze vein, leaving only a little bit, which made it even harder to detect.

In heaven and earth, there are certain elements that have special effects. Most people know of truewater and truefire, but there are also others, like truesoil, truewood, truethunder, truewind. Naturally, there are truemetals.

Artifacts or tools forged from Bloodguide Bronze had the ability to absorb and collect blood essence. If it was forged into a sword, it would be extremely effective in draining the blood of anything it cut. If forged into a cauldron, it would excel at controlling the blood used as materials by the alchemists or artificers.

Demons did not usually master professions like alchemist, artificer, or formation master. For them to collect it means it was incredibly important to their plans.

So, the true immortal investigators started to search. They searched for over a decade, and it was only by luck that they discovered the Hundred Pill Realm. The Hundred Pill Realm was a world dominated by humans. In it, alchemists reigned supreme.

Because of the overwhelming popularity of alchemy, most other professions and even combat declined. The Hundred Pill Realm didn’t have many combat techniques, and only rudimentary artificers and formation masters. In fact, most combat relied on pills. For example, an alchemist will swallow an antidote pill before immediately using a poison pill. Some even directly turned the elements into a pill before using them, like pill bombs.

Still, combat wasn’t the primary method used to solve conflicts. No, most people solved it through pill debates. In other words, they compared their alchemy skills. Whoever won was the winner.

Although death was present, it mainly happened from natural causes like the end of lifespan or disease. Few people died due to conflicts. At least, compared to most other realms. Because of this, the population of the Hundred Pill Realm was astonishing, over several times that of a higher realm. It had even reached the point that many forces inside started to consider sustainability.

At least, that was how the former Hundred Pill Realm was.

The Demon Clan took fancy to the Hundred Pill Realm several hundred years ago. However, they didn’t fancy it for its myriad alchemy inheritance, but the large number of humans. In ancient times, humans were the favorite food of demons. This wasn’t just because humans tasted good, but it boosted the demon’s cultivation.

Back when demons still roamed the Primordial World, the Heavenly Emperor Di Jun, a golden crow, had ordered the demons to massacre the humans in order to strengthen the demons to prepare for the war against the Titans. This was the root cause of the enmity between humanity and demons.

Of course, the higher the cultivation of the human eaten by the demon, the better the effect. However, most of the denizens of the Hundred Pill Realm were ordinary mortals, and it would take too long for a true demon to eat them in batches. It would be akin to humans eating mosquito meat, just not as revolting.

The Demon Clan first captured the strongest cultivators of the Hundred Pill Realm, mere core formation masters. Acupoint opening masters were a rarity in the Hundred Pill Realm because martial cultivators could not control fire and cauldron, as well as spiritual cultivators. And because of the lack of high combat manuals, martial cultivation was seen as an inferior path.

The demons did not kill those masters. Instead, they recycled them, turning them into Human Pills.

As the name suggested, Human Pills were related to Living Pills. In essence, Human Pills were similar in concept to Living Pills, making them the prototype of the latter. One took female humans with heavenly water spiritual roots and turned them into nourishment for cultivators. The other took human flesh and soul and transformed them into nourishment for demons.

Humans could also try to increase their own cultivation with Human Pills, but the effects weren’t as efficient compared to demons. Hence, the need to find females with heavenly water spiritual roots as materials. There was no doubt where the inspiration for Living Pills was taken from.

The demons had used the massive population as raw materials and refined them all into Human Pills. They would throw batches of humans into giant cauldrons and allow them to boil in their fellow humans’ blood until they were reduced to nothing but sludge. Not only was their flesh and blood used, but the cauldron also had the effect of destroying their soul and breaking them down into soul essence, preventing them from entering the Six Paths of Samsara and entering reincarnation.

In an ironic twist, the demons didn’t refine all the humans into Human Pills at once, but in batches so the population could be sustainable.

At the center of the Hundred Pill Realm was a giant cauldron of bronze and silver. It was forged from Bloodguide Bronze and Soulfall Silver and called the Blood and Soul Cauldron. Unlike the many other cauldrons used to refine Human Pills, only cultivators were thrown into this cauldron and refined into high-quality Human Pills.

While raising humanity like livestock, the demons would also screen them for talented human children. These human children would be raised and taught how to cultivate. Most could only reach the Foundation Establishment Realm, and few reached the Core Formation Realm. But all of them met the same fate, as raw materials for Human Pills.

The demons weren’t afraid of the human becoming stronger. After all, this wasn’t an immortal-rank realm. No matter how strong the humans became, could they become stronger than true demons? The only thing the demons had to worry about was the cultivators ascending and spreading the information.

When Ba Shifang and Meng Tingfeng entered the Hundred Pill Realm with four other monarchs, they immediately spread their immortal senses and scanned the entire realm. Their expression darkened immediately. They had already been informed by the true immortal scouts of all the important details, but they didn’t prevent the anger burning them when they actually saw it firsthand.

Meng Tingfeng took action first. He unsheathed his sword and waved it several times. Hundreds of sword lights erupted and struck all the demons. Only a few demons were spared, but that was only because he had not lost all his rationality and left them alive for interrogation. Still, they were disabled and all demons below the True Demon Realm perished.

Ba Shifang took action next. He plummeted to the ground, but just before crashing, he slowed down until he landed as light as a feather. He kneeled and placed his palm on the ground. The land in the central region of the Hundred Pill Realm started to quake. The tremors crawled up from the ground and attached to the cauldrons. Seconds later, they cracked and shattered. Not even the Blood and Soul Cauldron at the true immortal level could withstand Ba Shifang’s technique.

From the destroyed cauldrons, blood spilled forth and dyed the land red. Accompanying the leaking blood were the wails of the ghosts and phantoms created from the broken souls of the sacrificed humans. If they were not exorcised, they would become specters, unleashing decay and death.

The four other monarchs also took action almost at the same time. Each one displayed their specialties, subduing the demons. The one that stood out the most aside from Meng Tingfeng and Ba Shifang was an immortal monarch from the Immortal Court. Because he was a soul cultivator.

It was thanks to the soul monarch that the ghostly miasma evaporated. Ba Shifang also knew some techniques to cleanse the land, but he was not as well versed as a true soul cultivator. Besides, it would take him far more qi and effort.

Ba Shifang gazed at the human settlement, ignorant of their own ignorance. The demons would only capture a few settlements once in a while. It would spark terror, but that had become the norm for hundreds of years. The humans would only lament the terror of demons before moving on. Years later, they would forget and move into the formerly populated land, starting the process all over again.

He sighed. With a wave of his hand, hundreds of steles formed of earth and metal rose all around him. Engraved on those dark monuments were the cultivation methods of the Five Element Method. Naturally, they were the inferior method and not the original version owned by the Immortal Court. Not only that, but they only detailed up to the Nascent Soul Realm.

The steles shot into the air after Ba Shifang flung his arm. Those steles would appear all over the Hundred Pill Realm, waiting for people to stumble upon them. Hundreds of years later, the Hundred Pill Realm might change its name to the Five Element Realm.

None of the other immortal monarchs stopped Ba Shifang. After all, they were also human and could understand his feelings.

Then the interrogation began. As a soul cultivator, the soul monarch was the most ideal interrogator. Even if there was a true immortal skilled in interrogation, if he was not also a soul cultivator, his ability to extract information would pale in comparison.

Because the soul monarch was not skilled in interrogation, it took over a year to learn everything. The Demon Clan planned to wage war and needed to increase the strength of the average demon, so they came up with a method to strengthen the demons using Human Pills. This was the Demon Clan’s Human Refinement Plan.

The event in the Hundred Pill Realm was only a testing phase. If the results were good enough, they would find more realms and refine more Human Pills.

Once Ba Shifang learned of this, he couldn’t help but clenched his fist. ‘Does Longzi know?’

Although Donghai Longzi was categorically a demon, Ba Shifang still treated him as a human. After all, his root was a human clone of Tianyi. Even if his flesh was that of a true dragon, his heart should still be that of a human. Unless it was the cliche plot of a spy becoming a reverse spy?

Ba Shifang shook his head. That wasn’t likely. Unlike himself, Donghai Longzi never severed the connection between himself and Tianyi, meaning that his life was still in the latter’s hand. Unless Donghai Longzi really didn’t care about his life and death, he wouldn't betray Tianyi no matter how he empathized with the demons. Still, empathy could only go so far.

Logically, Ba Shifang knew that the humans did not have a right to point their hands and hold the moral high ground. How many times have humans used a demon's body as materials to refine pills or artifacts? Still, as a human, he could not allow this.

More than that, he had to know.

Luckily for them, the soul monarch managed to extract that the next time a demon would arrive to pick up the Human Pills would come in four years. According to the information, two demon monarchs should arrive to pick up the pills. Upon learning this, the Immortal Court and Numinous Sword Sect dispatched four more monarchs, making for a total of ten monarchs waiting for ambush.

With this scale, two mere demon monarchs would be captured. Now, all they needed to do was wait for the promised time.