Longevity: Starting as a menial servant in the Green Wood Sect

Chapter 54 Bloodstained Blade Pierced into Green Wood

The wind howled like weeping, its mournful roar echoing in my ears.

Gu An's body plummeted rapidly in the darkness, the feeling of weightlessness like an invisible hand gripping his heart tightly.

The faint light above had long been completely blocked out, and several feet above was the rapidly petrifying corpse of the Tai Sui. The once soft tube walls must now have turned into indestructible rock, becoming a tomb entrance that separated life and death.

"We must slow down!"

Gu Anqiang suppressed his surging blood and qi, and tried his best to spread his divine sense in the darkness.

Below was not a bottomless abyss; about a hundred feet away, a patch of jagged, strange rocks could be vaguely seen.

He suddenly exerted force in his waist and abdomen, forcibly twisting his body in mid-air, and plunged the broken "Cloud Piercing" sword, now only half intact, into the void beside him.

That was an inverted stalactite that he glimpsed in the instant of his fall.

"Sizzle—!!!"

The blade rubbed violently against the rock, sending up a string of dazzling sparks.

The immense force of the recoil traveled up his arm, instantly splitting his hand open and spurting blood. But Gu An refused to let go, using the resistance to halt his descent.

"Snap!"

The stalactite could not withstand such immense force and broke apart with a crash.

Taking advantage of this brief respite, Gu An flipped several times in mid-air to dissipate most of the impact, then curled up his limbs to protect his head and neck, crashing to the ground like a meteorite.

"Bang!"

A muffled thud echoed through the empty ground.

Gu An crashed heavily into a pile of rubble, kicking up clouds of dust. Although he was protected by "copper skin" and had the "Hundred-Refined Golden Body" as a foundation, the impact of falling from a height of a hundred feet still shook his internal organs to the point that they almost shifted.

"Wow--"

He spat out a mouthful of blood, then collapsed in a spread-eagle position amidst the rubble, his bones groaning as if they could no longer bear the strain.

Pain, excruciating pain.

But amidst this excruciating pain, a cool, tingling sensation was rising from the depths of my bone marrow. That was the "regeneration core" fragment I had previously ingested taking effect; its weak self-healing properties were being activated, and the broken muscle fibers were rapidly remodeling.

Gu An lay there for the time it takes for an incense stick to burn.

Once the dizziness subsided, he gritted his teeth and propped himself up, cautiously looking around.

This is an extremely vast underground cave.

The dome hangs high, like a dark night sky, with no end in sight.

The air was filled with a musty, damp, but not foul, smell; instead, it carried a faint scent of sulfur and...ancient dust.

There is no sunlight here, but it is not dark.

In the distance, vast expanses of moss, emitting a faint blue light, covered the rock walls and the ground like living carpets, casting a bizarre and surreal glow over this underground world, making it seem like a ghostly realm.

With the help of this faint blue light, Gu An finally saw his surroundings.

Upon seeing this, even with his calm and collected nature, his pupils couldn't help but shrink slightly.

What he was standing on was not a naturally formed jumble of rocks, but a huge, broken stone slab. The edges of the slab were smooth, and weathered carvings still remained on it.

Looking into the distance, at the end of that dark blue halo, broken walls and ruins stretch endlessly.

Collapsed stone pillars, stone statues half-buried in the mud, and the moat that has long since dried up...

This is not a natural cave at all; it is clearly an ancient relic buried deep underground by time and tectonic movements!

"The Abandoned Land..."

Gu An muttered to himself, a sense of foreboding rising in his heart.

The Qingmu Sect has only been established for a thousand years, but the scale and weathering of these underground ruins clearly exceed a thousand years.

The tunnel dug by the demonic cultivator, the yin veins where the Tai Sui was rooted, and the destination pointed to by the human skin map... all the clues seemed to point to this deeply buried secret at this moment.

Gu An did not act rashly. He first took out an antidote pill and held it under his tongue. Then he activated the Turtle Breathing Technique, suppressing his aura to the extreme, and his whole body almost blended into the surrounding shadows.

With his body hunched over, the broken sword in his hand pointed diagonally at the ground, and his feet moved silently toward the edge of the ruins.

The closer you get to the ruins, the stronger the desolate atmosphere becomes.

The surrounding spiritual energy was pitifully thin, even less so than in the servants' quarters. Here, once spiritual energy was exhausted, it was almost impossible to recover it through meditation.

"We need to use it sparingly."

Gu An touched the storage bag in his arms; it was his last resort.

As Gu An approached a collapsed archway, he paused slightly.

Only a solitary stone pillar remains of the archway, half-buried in the ground. The surface of the pillar is covered with dark green moss, but a few large, vigorous, and ancient characters can still be vaguely seen.

Gu An stretched out his hand, his palm releasing a slight spiritual force, gently shaking off the moss on the surface.

Although the writing is incomplete, it is still faintly discernible.

"...Demon Suppression... Division..."

Gu An frowned. The Demon Suppression Division? That seemed to be the name of a government office in a mortal dynasty, or perhaps an institution of some ancient cultivation dynasty?

His gaze moved downwards, and at the base of the stone pillar, he discovered a broken fragment of a stone tablet.

The stone tablet was only the size of a palm, and it seemed to have been cut off by a sharp weapon. The break was already worn away, but a pattern engraved on the surface of the tablet made Gu An's heart skip a beat.

It was a strangely shaped curved sword, its blade resembling a crescent moon, but it was tightly bound and pierced by a green vine.

"A blood-stained knife plunged into a piece of green wood..."

Gu An took out the human skin map he had seized from the demonic cultivator from his pocket, and then took out Zhao Feng's overseer token.

Comparison of the three.

The cloud pattern on the back of the token, the hidden mark on the back of the map, and the relief on this stone tablet.

Perfectly fitted!

It turns out that the so-called "Blood Blade Sect invasion" and the so-called "traitorous collusion" were not about seizing any territory, nor were they about that insignificant Xuan Yin Silk.

Their goal has always been this place!

"That scoundrel Zhao Feng, and the people behind him, have known about the secret underground for a long time."

A cold glint flashed in Gu An's eyes. "They're trying to use the pretext of war to secretly search for treasure in these underground ruins!"

The Tai Sui was merely a gatekeeper that happened to be blocking the entrance.

Having figured this out, Gu An felt a chill run down his spine.

If the higher-ups found out that he was still alive and had trespassed into this core forbidden area, even without the demonic cultivators taking action, a righteous elder like Han Qingsong would probably silence him immediately.

"We must find a way out, or... get the stuff before they do."

Gu An put the fragment of the stone tablet into his storage bag and was about to get up and continue deeper into the area.

Suddenly, the panel in my mind trembled without warning.

[Plant Affinity Talent Triggered]

[Warning: Extremely dangerous predatory presence detected!]

Gu An's body stiffened instantly, and he even forcibly stopped breathing at that moment.

His perception spread out along with his talent.

It didn't come from the wind, nor from ground vibrations.

That sense of danger came from the seemingly ordinary patch of dark blue moss beside him.

The moss, which had been swaying gently in the cold wind, had all stopped moving. All the mycelium had bowed down in unison, as if submitting to some supreme being, or trembling in fear.

"Who?!"

Gu An suddenly turned around, his broken sword held across his chest, his back arching instantly like a cheetah poised to pounce.

In the shadow of a broken wall less than twenty feet away from him.

A pair of eyes slowly opened.

Those are not human eyes.

It has no whites in its eyes, and its entire body is a deathly, eerie blue. Its pupils stand upright like needles, exuding an ancient indifference and bloodlust.

It hovered silently in the darkness, looking down at Gu An, this uninvited guest who had fallen from the sky.

As those eyes opened, the surrounding air seemed to freeze.

A terrifying pressure, several times stronger than that of a Qi Refining Grand Perfection cultivator, surged in silently like a tide.

"This is a Foundation Establishment stage... demonic beast?!"

Gu An's heart pounded, and his knuckles turned white from the strain.

There are actually living things in this sealed underground place!

Just then, the panel in front of me flickered eerily, freezing on a line of despairing text:

Current Location: Abandoned Underground Lands (Outer Core Area)

[Target encountered: ??? (Extremely dangerous)]

[Status: Minor injury, locked]

Those blue eyes narrowed slightly, and a low growl, like the turning of a millstone, came from the darkness.

Then, a black shadow as fast as lightning tore through the silence of the earth and rushed straight towards them!