After hearing Yaan out, the devilish spirit spared him a deep glance, then vanished without a word.

Yaan did not immediately return to Zue Yin, but watched as the old seer continued to sort and organised all of his materials. He helped out by removing everything he recognised, whilst also doing most of the labelling of the countless resources.

Whilst assisting the old lady, he vanished, reappearing in a one on one battle against the highest ranking warrior of the 3rd level. It was said that this burly, 8 feet tall man, deliberately stayed within the 3rd layer, just because he loved to crush all of those weaker challengers below him.

Yaan stared at this man, slowly forming a smile. After his earlier experience and his plentiful reading, he was beginning to understand.

This man was a body cultivator, and not just someone who trained his vital energy. He had powerful bones, muscles, tendons, organs and even plentiful essence blood. As for his actual vital cultivation, he was merely a 1-Star realm demon!

Facing such an opponent filled Yaan with joy.

As the fight began, he started by deliberately taking his time, attacking with half of his strength and speed, allowing himself to get struck, using multiple sword arts, all whilst steadily increasingly his ferocity. His opponent was also not going all out from the beginning, but his strength was quite significant, whilst his powerful flesh was seemingly immune to all of Yaan’s more casual attacks!

As time passed by, Yaan’s strength and speed reached the acme, as did his sword arts. Even then, this massive giant was just not going down! His flesh was so tough, Yaan needed to strike with far more power…!

So he chained his sword arts. When this stunned the man and made him stumble, Yaan suddenly burst forwards with an impossible speed. One step and he had moved with the wind, his Agile Sword Arts accelerating him massively. At the exact same time, not staggering the two arts in the least but using them simultaneously, Yaan utilised the Flowing River Blade Art! The two arts fused, water and wind, a propulsion of jet powered water launching him forwards…

Just as he activated Synchronised Pierce.

Knowing that in order to take down this giant, Yaan forced his speed to a maximum. He used the momentum from his two fused movement arts to accelerate the speed of stabbing forth using Synchronised Pierce. 3 times, 6 times, 9 times…somehow, before he knew what he had even done, 12 times!

Yaan stopped, gasping for breath, before he saw the blood leaking out from his opponent’s body. With no time to think, he charged forth then sank his teeth into the corpse’s neck. Yaan could feel the light covering around him, so he sucked harder. He even squeezed the corpse, all in an attempt to squeeze out the remaining blood in time!

And, he was back with the granny.

“You look terrible.” She commented dryly.

Yaan smiled wryly, then sat down and continued to help. He had managed to drain only around one third of that guy’s blood, though his body was at least quite large…

It’s not that Yaan had a taste for blood, he was no vampire. Rather, what he was trying to devour was the blood essence! By devouring blood essence, even if he didn’t manage to form more of his own, he could still refine more vital energy.

A couple hours later after sorting through Yaan’s loot, they were finally done.

Yaan paid for the full, premium service; he had everything identified, named, organised, categorised, and provided with a description of its uses, effects and dangers. He ended up paying her with a 3-Star astral crystal, quite the sum, but worth it in Yaan’s opinion.

Finally, after organising and identifying all of the belongings he had gathered throughout this inheritance, Yaan returned home He found Zue Yin waiting, still with the Fiend Alchemy guide in her hand.

“So?” Yaan asked, sipping his cup of tea calmly. Zue Yin fidget uncomfortably. She didn’t want to tell him, but…

“I already know, I just want to hear it from you.” Yaan sighed.

“Fine then. This book is titled ‘Fiend Alchemy’, not because it contains alchemy that can be carried out by fiends…but because it is an entire book, guide, manual and recipe list, wherein fiends are used as the core ingredients in the refinements. In this book…there are 378 different methods of using a fiend, or part of a fiend, to refine something, a pill or otherwise.” Zue Yin explained bluntly and seriously.

Yaan closed his eyes, then let out a deep sigh.

“Haah…”

After a long and awkward silence, Yaan opened his eyes drearily. He glanced at Zue Yin and asked her to open on a certain chapter.

“Zue Yin…read to me Chapter 6…”

“What am I, your slave?” She tutted, but upon seeing his complex gaze, she became silent, unable to come up with another such retort.

She opened the Fiend Alchemy book to Chapter 6.

“Chapter 6 - Vital Origin Rebirth Pill. One of the 9 supreme fiend medicines, this pill possess the ability to bring a near dead soul back to peak condition, whilst also forming an optimal physical vessel around the rejuvenated soul. The reborn entity will possess high talents in all regards, a phenomena stemming from the lingering power of Nirvana that pervades the reborn body and soul.”

Zue Yin paused, swallowing slightly as she glanced at Yaan. However, his expression was completely unreadable. With a sigh, she continued reading.

“Raising the fiend: The key is to raise the fiend into the perfect vital origin rebirth vessel, or else the refinement will result in failure. The fiend must focus on the Qi refining path, but must also cultivate vital energy alongside Yuan Qi until the peak 3-Star realm. In terms of Qi refining, the Qi Palace must possess a minimum of 7 layers in order for a demon core of sufficient strength to be developed….”

As Zue Yin continued to read this chapter, Yaan’s thoughts drifted away, lingering over those first portions of information. The latter descriptions of this refinement didn’t mean much to him, as he didn’t understand the following realms, the Origin Soul realm and Nirvana realm, all that well.

However, just the first half was enough.

Despite having read through this already, as well as many other similarly horrifying ‘alchemy recipes’, Zue Yin still felt disturbed when she read this. Looking at Yaan, she could only imagine why this precise recipe had such a big impact on him.

“Rui…was this your plan all along…?” Yaan muttered to himself dazedly.

He had always known that Rui was a demon, the most self serving woman he had ever met in fact. And yet somehow, he had always held onto the belief that she really did just want to train him so that he could become powerful enough to restore her strength.

“She wouldn’t- aha, no, she definitely would.” Yaan smiled bitterly. It took him about half a second to conclude that this was most definitely something that Rui would do.

“But maybe she didn’t know about this recipe book! Maybe-”

“Rui Bloodstar, what a strange name. Fitting of a demon deplorable enough to write a book such as this I suppose, but still, she-”

“Zue Yin.” Yaan sharply turned towards her, his eyes narrowing and his heart beat pounding wildly.

“Y-yes?” Her heart skipped a beat, flustered and caught off guard by Yaan’s sudden intensity.

“What did you just say? Just now, that name, what was it you said?”

“Huh…? I, I said Rui Bloodstar…I didn’t see it before since it’s hidden on the last page on the inside of the book, but it says the author name here, see?” As Zue Yin pointed towards the small italic name at the bottom of the last page, Yaan quickly grabbed the book, pulled it close to his face and stared in abject shock.

There was no mistaking it, Zue Yin was right. On the last page, it clearly stated…

Author: Rui Bloodstar

For a long while, Yaan just stared at the name with a stupid expression on his face. His mind went blank, as it was just such a shock!

But when he thought about it…no, the more he thought about it, the more insane this seemed to be! Just what was Rui’s connection to the original Fiend Transformation exactly, if she wrote an entire guide on using fiends as medicinal ingredients?!

More confusingly, how the hell did a book written by Rui, end up being given away as a trial reward in the North Ghu Inheritance?! How did that make any sense?!

Did Rui create the Fiend Transformation technique? Wait…was this her inheritance?!

“No, Rui wasn’t a body temperer and she definitely comprehended dao, unlike the creator of this inheritance.” Yaan calmed down his erratic mood and shook his head slowly. He knew that he was jumping to conclusions here. Whilst this was extremely bizarre, he couldn’t make any solid conclusions just yet.

“Hah…”

To this day, Yaan was still uncertain about the best way to awaken Rui. However, he had some ideas. His guess was that she was in such a deep slumber, or was so exhausted, that even the act of devouring any external energy would use up the last of her reserves. Basically, it meant that she wouldn’t waste her efforts unless there was something worth devouring.

For now though, Yaan was not going to awake Rui. There were still too many things he didn’t understand, too many suspicious and highly dubious matters.

He wasn’t the same naive child that he had been back in the Heavenly Path Sect. If he was going to bring Rui back, first, he would need to have some certainty that she wouldn’t be able to just attack and kill him at will. He needed to become stronger, and he needed to learn more about souls so that he could control or subdue her if necessary.

There were of course plenty of benefits to having Rui around. She was wise and experienced, she could deduce and perceive things that he could not…but even she wasn’t perfect in that regard, especially not in her severely weakened state.

But, she was a teacher. She knew techniques, she knew spells, she probably knew the locations of treasures and less dangerous inheritance sites! Most importantly, she understood cultivation better than anyone Yaan knew.

But Yaan had vowed to himself, back when he faced the devilish spirit and they discussed cultivation, that he would only ever follow his own path. He would not be dictated or influenced by the ideas of others. Even without Rui’s guidance, he would be able to find his way.

So then, what right now…?

Well, firstly, Yaan wanted to continue fighting. There were a few reasons for this. Firstly, battling increasingly powerful and varied opponents was helping to hone his own skills. Secondly, defeating them earned him massive amounts of wealth. Thirdly, he could move up to a higher level abode, benefiting from the increased spiritual pressure and the wondrous herbs and fruits that were supposedly abundant from the 4th level upwards.

But also…he needed to accumulate a few more days of ‘time off’.

Every time he killed an opponent in the battleground, Yaan accumulated an additional day of ‘immunity’. Once he used a day of immunity, nobody was allowed to challenge him for 24 hours. If he stacked up a 100 days of immunity, he could very well use them all back to back, giving him a 100 day rest…

Well, he didn’t actually want a 100 day rest. What he truly wanted, was to finally use the damned Rank 3 organ hardening pill! This pill required 99 days of seclusion, so Yaan’s plan was to continue stacking up immunity days, then to use those days whilst visiting the 4th level pagoda. Supposedly, that place contained a temporal acceleration chamber!

He would soon know if that was true. Earlier today, he had already defeated an opponent from the upper 3rd level, and the day before, he defeated a trio consisting of one from the upper 2nd, one from the lower 3rd and one from the upper 3rd level abodes.

Now, he was about to battle the second strongest character of the 3rd level…supposedly, this guy actually came out from seclusion, just because he wanted to fight Yaan!

As he progressed from the lower to upper 3rd levels, Yaan found that the strength of his opponents was getting closer to his own level. Not only that, but he was finding a higher number of body temperers, as well as those with strange cultivation’s and abilities.

He was certainly looking forwards to his next fight.