Ye Qingxuan flew cautiously at a low altitude, beginning his exploration of Demon Domain Number Three.
He pushed the seed of his minor divine ability, Deception of Heaven, to its very limit, constantly masking his presence.
After all, the Demon Domain was practically the Green Demon Clan’s home turf.
If he wasn’t careful and ran into a Green Demon above the Golden Core stage, this clone of his would be as good as dead.
Because any Green Demon above Golden Core had a far greater perception range than he did.
If he really encountered one and failed to conceal his aura in time,
he’d probably be discovered without even realizing it, walking right into the lion’s den like a lamb to the slaughter.
After flying low for about an hour, Ye Qingxuan had no choice but to stop and replenish his spiritual energy with spirit stones.
The Demon Domain was still the Demon Domain, no matter how thin the demonic energy in this area happened to be—he simply couldn’t avoid it completely.
His spiritual barrier clashed with the demonic energy, and though it wore down a fair amount of it, his own spiritual power was also being consumed in the process.
Add to that the constant flying, and after just an hour of exploration with nothing to show for it, over half his spiritual energy was already gone.
In the Demon Domain, he couldn’t afford to wait until he was completely drained before recovering—he had to keep at least half his energy in reserve for emergencies.
And this was after he’d stopped actively powering the divine ability seed for Deception of Heaven.
Because Ye Qingxuan had realized that, given his clone’s current level of cultivation,
if he wanted to hide his presence in the Demon Domain, his only real options were to stay perfectly still in one spot or move while completely avoiding all demonic energy.
Otherwise, the fluctuations caused by his spiritual barrier colliding with demonic energy simply couldn’t be hidden.
As he flew along, his spiritual barrier flickered intermittently like a short-circuiting wire, giving off an annoying sizzling sound.
The main issue was simply that his clone’s cultivation was too low.
If he were at the Golden Core stage or above, he could have just circulated his spiritual energy internally to repel this ambient first-tier demonic energy without it affecting his movements at all.
That was precisely why lower-stage cultivators weren’t advised to venture into the Demon Domain.
A low-level cultivator entering the Demon Domain was basically like chum tossed into a fish tank—they almost never came back.
After restoring his spiritual energy, Ye Qingxuan let out a wry smile, raised his spiritual barrier again, and pressed on.
In that first hour, aside from spotting some demonized animals and creatures, he hadn’t found any trace of demon veins or Green Demon Clan members.
If his main body had been here, he would have already left the Demon Domain without a second thought.
A clone, after all, was just a clone—if it fell, it fell. The only real loss would be the spirit stones invested in it.
But since he was already in the Demon Domain, Ye Qingxuan wasn’t about to leave without stirring up some trouble.
After another half-hour of flight, he suddenly paused.
His senses told him that there seemed to be a village of Green Demons directly ahead—or perhaps a small tribe.
Though the Green Demon Clan were demons, they still had their own civilization and traditions.
Most Green Demons in the Demon Domain lived gathered together in tribes or nations.
After spotting this small tribal settlement, Ye Qingxuan reactivated Deception of Heaven and began stealthily approaching, carefully avoiding demonic energy as much as possible.
When he drew close enough, he muttered in confusion:
“No cultivators? Just ordinary Green Demon clansfolk without any cultivation?”
It seemed that the area of the Demon Domain he’d landed in was indeed remote and barren—no wonder the ambient demonic energy was so thin.
Ye Qingxuan hid in the shadows and carefully observed the small Green Demon tribe. There were roughly a few hundred clansfolk, all without cultivation.
In appearance, Green Demons were similar to primates, but they had four eyes, green faces, and sharp fangs, with black energy occasionally wafting off their bodies.
Looking at these hundreds of defenseless Green Demons, a cold glint flashed in Ye Qingxuan’s eyes.
In the subsidiary small thousand worlds of the Earth Mystery Realm, the Green Demon Clan had used brutal methods to slaughter countless human mortals.
So for this group of powerless Green Demons, he naturally felt no mercy whatsoever.
He pulled out three third-tier Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Detonation Pills and hurled them hard toward the center of the tribe.
He didn’t plan on wasting his spiritual energy—he wanted to test how effective the pills would be in the Demon Domain.
Boom! Rumble—Sizzle, sizzle…
The three pills exploded in the middle of the Green Demon village, and the third-tier Spirit-Cleansing energy inside spread rapidly.
When that energy met the demonic energy of the Demon Domain, a violent reaction erupted, with constant sizzling sounds filling the air.
In just a few moments, the small Green Demon village was filled with agonizing wails.
For humans, the energy from the Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Detonation Pill was like a purifier—it washed away negative energies and cleansed spiritual power, acting as a kind of positive-charged energy.
But for Green Demons, that same energy was like a deadly poison. Once it touched them, large amounts of their demonic mass and flesh began dissolving at an alarming rate.
More than half of the cultivation-less Green Demons died instantly under the onslaught of third-tier energy.
A smaller portion survived, but lost their minds entirely, undergoing strange mutations and attacking and tearing into their own clansfolk in a frenzy.
In the end, the energy released by those three third-tier pills directly wiped out all the demonic energy within a three-li radius of the Green Demon settlement.
Even Ye Qingxuan—the one who’d caused it all—couldn’t help but stare in stunned disbelief.
The effect of the Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Detonation Pills in the Demon Domain far exceeded his expectations.
“Well… that actually makes sense,”
he said, quickly piecing it together.
The main reason the third-tier pills had been so devastating was that the demonic energy in this region was simply too low in both concentration and grade.
Demonic energy had its own hierarchy, after all.
Though all demon veins produced demonic energy, the purity of that energy varied greatly depending on the vein’s tier.
The energy purity of Ye Qingxuan’s third-tier Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Detonation Pills was on par with the energy produced by a third-tier demon vein.
Meanwhile, the demonic energy in the air of this Demon Domain area was only around first-tier, which was why the third-tier pill energy could easily annihilate it.
The same principle applied to spiritual veins, spirit stones, and even the spiritual energy inside cultivators.
The spiritual energy produced by different tiers of spiritual veins, and the energy contained in different grades of spirit stones—
aside from differing in concentration, their purity also varied significantly.
The higher the purity of spiritual energy, the less resistance there was for a cultivator’s spirit root to refine it, and the more efficiently it could be converted into usable spiritual power.
So both the concentration and the purity of spiritual energy could affect a cultivator’s cultivation speed.
That said, to enjoy the benefits of high-purity spiritual energy, you had to cultivate in a cave dwelling opened in the core area of a spiritual vein.
Take the Xuantian Mountain Range of the Xuantian Sect, for example. Though the spiritual energy in the mountain’s core area had a concentration comparable to a fifth-tier spiritual vein,
the purity of the spiritual energy spreading through the range could probably only barely match the energy in the core region of a fourth-tier vein.
As for the spiritual energy inside a cultivator’s body—
different cultivation stages meant different levels of condensation and purity.
Generally speaking, the condensed purity of a Qi Refining cultivator’s spiritual energy would be slightly superior to the energy in the core of a first-tier spiritual vein, but weaker than that of a second-tier vein.
Apart from the semi-immortal force that Mahayana-stage cultivators had already transformed within their bodies, cultivators at other stages followed pretty much this same rule.
After a moment of thought, Ye Qingxuan grasped the logic and murmured softly:
“So it seems that Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Detonation Pills should work just as well against lower-tier Green Demons.”
He then looked back at the Green Demons—some already dead, others horribly mutated—and his gaze remained cold.
From what he knew, the Green Demon Clan’s experts had repeatedly attempted to use demonic energy to corrupt human villages in the small thousand worlds affiliated with the Earth Mystery Realm.
This time, he was simply paying them back in kind.
Still, even though he’d wiped out a small Green Demon tribe, Ye Qingxuan hadn’t gained much from it personally.
These Green Demons had no cultivation to speak of, so their bodies could barely yield any source energy from the Green Demon Realm at all.
And after being blasted by the Spirit-Cleansing pills, their bodies were pitted and scarred, oozing dark, foul fluids that made Ye Qingxuan feel sick just looking at them.
So he decided not to bother recovering these corpses, which held little value anyway.
Just as he was about to leave, however, his expression suddenly shifted. He raised his head and looked toward the distant sky.
