Chapter Ninety-One: Concealment, Part Four

“This corpse was already here before our Water City ever opened the ancient tomb. It should be the tomb’s owner.”

Seeing that Li Ju remained unmoved by the treasure, General Wang shook his head with some regret.

Li Ju walked slowly through piles of gold and silver until he stood before the ancient corpse.

“The owner of the tomb?” he murmured.

“Not necessarily.”

He suddenly narrowed his eyes.

“What do you mean by that, sir?” General Wang asked, somewhat puzzled, as he came to Li Ju’s side.

But Li Ju did not explain. His gaze was fixed instead on the lines of writing carved beside the corpse.

“A Demon Cult cipher…”

Looking at the inscription, Li Ju spoke softly, so softly that only he himself could hear.

The language used in that text was none other than the secret script employed by the Demon Cult to convey the most confidential matters!

“Do these patterns have some special meaning?” General Wang followed Li Ju’s gaze to the article written in the Demon Cult’s secret script beside the corpse, but all he could see were only decorative patterns.

The greatest peculiarity of the Demon Cult’s cipher was that it looked very much like ornamentation. If one did not know how to read it, even upon seeing the secret script one would mistake it for nothing more than a decorative design.

If Li Ju had not deliberately studied the Demon Cult’s secret script, he too would likely have taken these characters for mere patterns when he came here.

I am Xiao Hao, elder of the Demon Cult. I came from the Chen Kingdom in search of the place where our cult first arose, and in doing so reached this land...

After finishing the text written in the Demon Cult’s secret script, Li Ju roughly understood what had happened to this corpse.

When Li Ju finally deciphered the writing, his face instantly changed with shock. Clearly, the contents of the text had struck him with great force.

According to the inscription, this Demon Cult elder named Xiao Hao had lived some two hundred years earlier. Though he was a member of the Demon Cult, he was by nature a lover of learning and spent his life buried in books, studying ancient texts. Yet perhaps his talent in martial arts was so extraordinary that even without devoting his mind to cultivation in daily life, his strength had gradually advanced to the half-step Minor Three-Origins realm, only one step away from a true breakthrough into the Minor Three-Origins realm.

After he reached the half-step Minor Three-Origins realm, the Demon Cult leader of that era wanted him to become the next cult master. He refused. After his refusal, the cult leader of that time did not bother with words and suppressed him at once, then cast him into the deepest and most mysterious part of the Demon Cult’s inner prison.

At the bottom of that prison, he witnessed a scene so shocking that it shook him to the core. There, he saw many famous experts from throughout history at the Minor Three-Origins realm, as well as masters at the half-step Minor Three-Origins realm.

He even saw two Minor Three-Origins experts who had lived in the same era as the Demon Cult’s founder, Mojia Ren. By all rights, those two experts should have long been dead, yet for reasons unknown, the Demon Cult had kept them alive.

Soon, however, Xiao Hao learned how the Demon Cult had managed to sustain them: by feeding them rare treasures of heaven and earth.

Countless precious natural treasures, the kind the outside world might go hundreds of years without ever seeing once, were fed day and night to the prisoners held at the bottom of the inner prison. Those at the Minor Three-Origins realm were given treasures that prolonged life; those at the half-step Minor Three-Origins realm were fed treasures that could help them break through into the Minor Three-Origins realm.

It was as though they were feeding pigs.

Every Minor Three-Origins expert imprisoned at the bottom of the Demon Cult’s inner prison had had their limbs severed, leaving only the torso. The half-step Minor Three-Origins experts were merely waiting to be fed until they broke through to the Minor Three-Origins realm, after which their limbs would also be removed.

Xiao Hao estimated that at the bottom of the inner prison there were at least several dozen masters from different eras, both at the Minor Three-Origins realm and the half-step Minor Three-Origins realm. People from righteous sects such as the Seven-Three Sect, Mount Taibai, and Dharma Gate Temple were all imprisoned there, and so were members of the Demon Cult itself.

The only ones absent were the successive cult masters of the Demon Cult who had reached the Minor Three-Origins realm; they were nowhere to be found.

Later, for reasons unknown, disorder broke out at the bottom of the Demon Cult’s inner prison. Xiao Hao and several other half-step Minor Three-Origins experts seized the chaos and fled from the depths. Xiao Hao also took the chance to seize a divine weapon from the Demon Cult. In the end, after repeated pursuits, only Xiao Hao managed to escape the Chen Kingdom alive.

After fleeing Chen Kingdom, Xiao Hao, in order to continue evading the Demon Cult’s pursuit, had no choice but to enter the Yellow Sand Desert, intending to cross it and make for the Demon Cult’s place of origin, the Ancient Posa Kingdom.

But while passing through the Great Oasis, Xiao Hao discovered this ancient tomb at the bottom of Mirror Lake and broke in here. After delving deeper into the tomb, he was grievously wounded by its mechanisms, and ultimately died here in the tomb, seated in final repose.

Li Ju remained silent for a long while after reading the words Xiao Hao had left behind.

The scene in the bottom of the Demon Cult’s inner prison described in Xiao Hao’s writing had dealt him an enormous shock.

“Imprisoning dozens of masters at the Minor Three-Origins realm, then continually fattening half-step experts until they reached the Minor Three-Origins realm, just like feeding livestock—what on earth was the Demon Cult trying to accomplish?” Li Ju recalled the endings of the Minor Three-Origins masters of past generations and realized that they had all, without exception, ended in disappearance. Not one had died a normal death. Before, he had never paid attention to such details. After all, grudges and bloodshed in the martial world were common enough. But now, in light of Xiao Hao’s account...

“And if this had truly been the Demon Cult’s practice ever since the day it was founded, then where, over these past hundreds of years, did they obtain so many rare heavenly treasures to feed the masters they imprisoned?”

“And the founder of the Seven-Three Sect, the Venerable Seven-Three, still remains within the Seven-Three Sect, while my former master from the Seven-Three Sect, Ling Yuan, also escaped from within the sect rather than being taken by the Demon Cult. Why, then, did the Demon Cult not move against the ancestors of the Seven-Three Sect?”

“And if Xiao Hao meant to reveal this matter to the world, why did he not speak of it in the Chen Kingdom? Why did he not spread it through the Great Oasis? And why did the text he left behind have to be written in the Demon Cult’s secret script, known only to members of the cult?”

One question after another swirled in Li Ju’s mind. Regrettably, none of them could be answered now. To solve them, he would need far more information.

“But whatever the case, I must still make a trip to the Ancient Posa Kingdom.”

Li Ju let out a long breath.

According to Xiao Hao, the reason he had gone to the Ancient Posa Kingdom was not only to evade the Demon Cult’s pursuit, but also because he wished to uncover information related to Mojia Ren.

Xiao Hao believed that the Demon Cult’s strange conduct must be inseparable from Mojia Ren, yet there was far too little information about him. Even within the Demon Cult itself, not much about Mojia Ren had survived in circulation.

In the history of the Chen Kingdom, Mojia Ren seemed to have simply sprung forth from nowhere. The moment he appeared, he was already a master at the Minor Three-Origins realm. The moment he appeared, he was already unmatched beneath heaven.

Thus, Xiao Hao decided to go personally to the Ancient Posa Kingdom to search for clues concerning Mojia Ren.