An hour later,
The woman from the Celestial Curtain Palace watched their retreating figures, her heart swelling with elation deep inside.
Holy Lord Yang had returned! The continent was saved! Although she had never had any prior dealings with
"
"Indeed. But it's something that can only be accomplished at the expense of the star's very foundation."
These crystals had all been found inside Mu Chengfeng's spatial ring.
One of them was a half-finished product, the very one obtained from the Spirit Devouring Formation, while the rest were fully refined—clearly the fruits of Mu Chengfeng and his cohorts' labor over the past year.
Every ounce of spiritual energy within these crystals had originally belonged to the Profound Continent.
According to the woman from the Celestial Curtain Palace, the Spirit Devouring Sect had suddenly arrived on the Profound Continent a year ago. When a warship descended from the sky, the continent's cultivators had been completely baffled, with no idea what was happening. But after the Spirit Devouring Sect suppressed the Profound Continent with overwhelming force, they had begun enslaving its cultivators, putting them to work maintaining the Spirit Devouring Formation.
Those who resisted were killed without mercy.
Within a single year, dozens of forces on the Profound Continent had been wiped out entirely!
The Celestial Curtain Palace had suffered devastating losses as well—only a thousand people had survived.
"You've never heard of the Spirit Devouring Sect before, Elder?"
Ghost Ancestor shook his head. "No. You know as well as I that I was trapped for two thousand years and haven't been free for very long. My knowledge of the Star Domain's affairs is rather limited. However… aren't you holding someone right now who could be asked about this?"
"You mean…"
In the next instant, Zi Donglai's soul flickered into view, his face a mask of trepidation as he gazed at
"We haven't arrived at
"Please ask, Brother Yang. I will hold nothing back." Zi Donglai wiped his brow, seeming considerably relieved.
"Have you ever heard of a force called the Spirit Devouring Sect?"
"Spirit Devouring Sect?" Zi Donglai's expression shifted, a look of deep wariness surfacing on his face.
"So you do know about them?"
"I do know of them. Why? Could it be that Brother Yang has encountered the Spirit Devouring Sect?" Zi Donglai stared at
"That's right. I just ran into a group of cultivators who called themselves the Spirit Devouring Sect. They had set up a Spirit Devouring Formation and were refining a type of item called a Spirit Devouring Crystal." As he spoke,
"Those really are Spirit Devouring Crystals!" Zi Donglai's eyes instantly blazed with heat as he stared fixedly at the crystal, naked greed written across his face. But before long, he remembered that his physical body had already been destroyed and that Spirit Devouring Crystals were utterly useless to him now. His expression fell.
"Tell me—what's the story behind this Spirit Devouring Sect? You seem quite wary of them."
"The Spirit Devouring Sect… well, I've never encountered them myself. I only came across some records in the archives of
"As a result, the three great powers of the Star Domain all conducted investigations into the Spirit Devouring Sect. They eventually discovered that the sect had somehow acquired a secret technique—exactly the method you spoke of, Brother Yang—for setting up Spirit Devouring Formations and refining Spirit Devouring Crystals. The sect's cultivators would then absorb and refine the energy within the crystals, gaining enormous boosts in power over a very short period."
"If that had been all there was to it, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. The critical issue was that the sect's rise was accompanied by the decline of Sirius itself. In less than fifty years since the Spirit Devouring Sect's founding, the density of spiritual energy on Sirius had plummeted by several orders of magnitude. Only then did the three great powers realize the severity of the problem. Every cultivation star was an invaluable asset to the Star Domain—they could not simply allow the Spirit Devouring Sect to run rampant. If left unchecked, Sirius would likely collapse entirely. So after conferring with one another, the three powers jointly dispatched their strongest experts to Sirius to attack the Spirit Devouring Sect's headquarters."
"In that battle, the Spirit Devouring Sect was eradicated root and branch, but the three great powers also sustained considerable losses. It was something that had never happened before—in all the history of the Star Domain, no single sect had ever been able to stand against the combined might of the three great powers. After that battle, the Spirit Devouring Sect vanished from the stage of history. I had thought they were long extinct. I never expected there were still stragglers who had escaped."