Seasons came and went, and in the blink of an eye, another ten years had passed.
Over the course of that decade, the Tianyuan Merchant Guild’s great ship far out in the Endless Sea had made another jump, bringing it one step closer to the Eastern Extremity Region.
Aboard that ship,
Ye Qingxuan’s external incarnation, Gui Xuanzi, had kept a low profile throughout the ten years, rarely interacting with anyone.
Still, a decade is a long time. By overhearing casual conversations, Ye Qingxuan had pieced together a fair bit about the other passengers on the ship.
Apart from the Tianyuan Merchant Guild’s own people, there weren’t actually many passengers headed for the Eastern Extremity Region—only about a dozen or so.
These dozen or so individuals had quarters not far from Ye Qingxuan’s private cabin.
Most of them were scions of cultivation families from the vicinity of East Binhzhou, and moreover, they were direct-line descendants of those families.
For the most part, these young masters had found their family’s sphere of influence too dull.
After reading about the chaotic descriptions of the Eastern Extremity Region in their family archives, they’d gotten it into their heads to go there for some real experience.
Most of these youngsters were privileged sons who had never really faced any setbacks.
After spending over a decade on the ship—past the initial excitement—one or two of them were already having second thoughts and wanted to turn back to the Eastern Domain.
But the Tianyuan Merchant Guild crew wasn’t about to indulge them. They flatly ignored such unreasonable requests and simply gave them the cold shoulder.
Sure, these young masters came from respectable backgrounds, but standing before the Tianyuan Merchant Guild—which was backed by the hegemonic Tianyuan Sect—they didn’t amount to much.
So the guild’s people had no fear of them, especially when they made demands that violated the guild’s rules.
Fortunately, these family scions weren’t stupid. They knew they couldn’t afford to offend the guild, so they didn’t push the issue further.
When family disciples go out for their first training expedition, they usually have a guardian watching over them from the shadows.
Whether any such guardians were secretly following these young masters aboard the ship, Ye Qingxuan had no way of knowing.
Aside from them, there were also two sect disciples who seemed to be heading to the Eastern Extremity Region for some kind of mission. Ye Qingxuan didn’t know the specifics.
In his eyes, these people were nothing but trouble, so he wanted nothing to do with them.
He was on this journey for serious business, so naturally he didn’t want to pick up any unnecessary karmic ties—which was precisely why his external incarnation kept to himself and avoided interacting with them.
Likewise, from their perspective, Ye Qingxuan’s incarnation was just a strange, antisocial recluse.
As for Ye Qingxuan’s other avatar, the Mysterious Merchant, life had been equally uneventful.
In ten years, Star Battle City still showed no signs of expanding, and Ye Qingxuan still hadn’t secured a stable channel for acquiring Green Demon corpses.
Still, after running a temporary shop for a decade, he hadn’t come away empty-handed.
Over those ten years, he’d gained several regular customers.
From one of them, he learned that the foot traffic in Star Battle City was gradually approaching the threshold for expansion. It seemed the city would soon announce another round of growth.
But this time, it would likely be Star Battle City’s final expansion.
The war between the Earth Mystery Realm and the Green Demon Realm had been raging for years, and the situation at all the war cities had basically stabilized.
So after this next expansion, the city would probably never push outward again.
In other words, if Ye Qingxuan wanted to buy a permanent shop in Star Battle City, this upcoming expansion would be his last chance.
Compared to the calm lives of his incarnations Gui Xuanzi and the Mysterious Merchant,
Ye Qingxuan’s explorer avatar had lived a decidedly thrilling decade.
In just ten short years, that avatar had wiped out no fewer than forty-eight Green Demon tribes of various sizes.
Among them: one tribe with a Golden Core cultivator at its helm, twelve tribes led by Purple Mansion cultivators, and the vast majority consisting of tribes with Foundation Building cultivators in charge.
As for those tribes without even a Foundation Building cultivator—he’d taken out a few early on, but later just ignored them.
It wasn’t that Ye Qingxuan didn’t want to kill them; it was that his actions had eventually enraged the higher-ups of the Green Demon faction in Demon Domain No. 3.
They dispatched a large number of elite warriors to hunt down his explorer avatar.
If it weren’t for his minor divine ability—Heaven-Deceiving Illusion—and its formidable power, his avatar might have fallen long ago.
The Green Demons’ manhunt forced Ye Qingxuan’s avatar to dial things back a bit.
So in the later years, he stopped taking unnecessary risks for meager gains, which was why he let those weaker tribes be.
Now, don’t be fooled—though he hadn’t killed as many high-level Green Demon experts as those Spirit Transformation teams, the number of tribes he’d annihilated was on par with any ordinary Spirit Transformation squad from the Earth Mystery Realm.
That was exactly why the Green Demons had put him on their hit list.
Or rather, their experts were hunting all Spirit Transformation cultivators from the Earth Mystery Realm who ventured into the demon domains.
And Ye Qingxuan’s avatar had made the list simply by killing too effectively.
Once a name was on that list, the Green Demon experts would pay a heavy price to forcibly track down the cultivator’s aura signature.
Cultivators usually have all sorts of secret techniques or magical items to conceal themselves, but the moment they make a move, they inevitably leave traces of their aura.
Even if they clean it up afterward,
wherever they’ve been, traces remain—it’s just a matter of how prominent those traces are and how hard they are to obtain.
If the Green Demon experts were willing to spend enough,
they could forcibly use secret arts to collect residual aura from the battlefield and track down Earth Mystery Realm experts with it.
Once they had that aura signature, the moment an Earth Mystery Realm squad struck again, the Green Demons could lock onto the fluctuation and launch an encirclement at the source.
So for any Earth Mystery Realm squad, the very act of hunting Green Demon tribes or experts was also their most vulnerable moment—the time they risked exposure.
Over the ten years his explorer avatar roamed Demon Domain No. 3, he’d experienced no shortage of heart-pounding close calls.
He’d even witnessed from a distance a battle where a Spirit Transformation squad from Earth Mystery Realm was cornered by Green Demon experts.
In that fight, out of a five-man Spirit Transformation team, three fell on the spot—only two managed to escape the encirclement.
In the later years, Ye Qingxuan’s avatar had been hunted several times as well.
Fortunately, his Heaven-Deceiving Illusion divine ability came through for him time and again, helping him evade several deadly traps.
As the war between the two realms intensified, both sides began sending forces to invade each other’s subordinate worlds.
Now, both the minor worlds under the Earth Mystery Realm and the various demon domains under the Green Demon Realm had experts patrolling at irregular intervals, rooting out and eliminating invaders from the other side.
Demon Domain No. 3 was no exception—Green Demon experts patrolled it constantly.
Whenever Ye Qingxuan’s avatar struck a Green Demon tribe, the proximity of these patrolling experts directly determined how fast the counterattack would come.
So both his avatar and the Earth Mystery Realm’s Spirit Transformation teams faced a simple rule:
If the patrolling Green Demon experts happened to be nearby when they attacked a tribe, the danger level would spike dramatically.
Quite a few Spirit Transformation cultivators from the Earth Mystery Realm had met their end simply because luck wasn’t on their side in that regard.
Deep within Demon Domain No. 3,
Ye Qingxuan’s explorer avatar was hidden in a stretch of forest, absently tossing a storage pouch in his hand, a conflicted expression on his face.
He was hesitating: should he head back to the Earth Mystery Realm first and send this decade’s haul back to the Qingxuan Paradise?
Or should he first take out that Green Demon tribe with a Nascent Soul cultivator he’d recently discovered,
and then carry that Nascent Soul demon’s corpse back with him?
After going back and forth in his mind,
he finally decided to hold off and send his ten years’ worth of gains back to the Qingxuan Paradise first.
If his avatar slipped up and fell in Demon Domain No. 3, then a whole decade of effort would have been for nothing.
With that settled,
Ye Qingxuan’s explorer avatar took out an array disk, activated it, and opened a temporary spatial gate connected to the passageway.
Stepping through that gate, his avatar vanished without a trace, leaving Demon Domain No. 3 behind.
