Chapter Eighty-Six: The Burial Mound of the Yellow Weasel

After outfitting the skeleton warriors, Li Yunfei directed them into a straight line. Then he raised the crescent-bladed guandao high, channeling soul power along the shaft and into the blade as golden saber aura rapidly gathered.

With a sharp sweep, ten great blades fell at once. Ten golden crescent arcs, each more than half a zhang high, slashed forward in a neat row, carving ten deep furrows into the ground.

The sight was truly magnificent. Li Yunfei felt his blood surge. With such might, what were thousands of troops and countless horses to him?

He could simply cut straight through them.

In terms of pure martial combat, Li Yunfei himself might not even be a match for these skeleton warriors, for they actually understood martial arts.

In their hands, the guandao displayed even fiercer power than it did in his own.

A pity the aura armor was brown, lacking a little grandeur. If it had been golden armor to match the golden aura, then one day Li Yunfei might be able to stage a scene worthy of a city clad entirely in gold.

Deeply satisfied, he gave one of the skeleton warriors a hearty slap on the back, then used his thoughts to tap Recall beneath the skeleton icon on the status panel.

Golden light spread beneath the skeleton warriors’ feet, and the Spirit-Summoning Array appeared once more. Only this time, the light rising from it was no longer white, but the same golden radiance as the skeleton warriors themselves.

Once the array appeared, the skeleton warriors sank into it under the shroud of golden light. It looked as though they were sinking into the earth, though in truth they were returning to the space within the Bone Spirit Emblem.

As the skeleton warriors vanished, the Spirit-Summoning Array rapidly shrank and turned back into ten Bone Spirit Emblems.

Only now, the emblems had become crystalline in texture.

After tidying up the battlefield, Li Yunfei returned to the ritual altar.

By now, testing the flying swords had consumed eighty percent of his spiritual power cultivation.

It was not suitable to go looking for the next instance immediately, so he swallowed another Pig King Pill and let his cultivation recover on its own while he began drawing blue talismans on the altar.

With blue talismans in hand, yellow talismans could be phased out in the future.

To save time this round, he did not draw all eighty-odd talismans he was capable of controlling. He drew only twenty-some of the more commonly used ones.

His average speed in talisman drawing remained steady at about three per minute. More than two hundred talismans were finished in a little over an hour, and he sold them all to the system shop.

By then, his spiritual power cultivation had also more or less recovered.

Normally, when his spiritual power was exhausted, if he actively cultivated to recover it would take three to four hours; if he simply let it restore itself, it would take fourteen to fifteen.

With the tenfold acceleration, however, it took only about an hour and a half to return to full.

With a wave of his hand, he put away the table serving as the ritual altar, recalled the Daoist robe and all the rest of his equipment, and the little fox returned to her original form as well. Only then did Li Yunfei issue the command in his mind to leave the instance.

His vision blurred, and in an instant he was once more standing beneath the bright light of day. The graveyard before him, however, showed not the slightest sign of disturbance.

No dark clouds hung overhead. No graves had split open. Not a trace marked the ground.

The battle just now felt as though it had happened in a dream.

Only the great half-ring of wooden stakes behind him, which he had planted to set up the Iron Encirclement City Formation, along with the iron and copper wires broken inch by inch across the ground, clearly proved that none of it had been a dream.

Paranormal instances were probably something like spaces of another dimension.

Li Yunfei released his divine sense, and those wooden stakes rose from the earth one after another before being gathered into the system inventory. They could be used later to hang large banner talismans.

As for the iron and copper wires on the ground, he blasted a pit open with a palm strike and buried them inside.

After finishing everything, Li Yunfei picked up the little fox and settled her on his shoulder, then turned and left to search for the next instance.

This time, under his lavish pay-to-win style of fighting, the instance ended very quickly, taking less than an hour.

Adding the little over an hour spent drawing talismans and restoring his cultivation, it still came to less than two and a half hours total.

It was only around ten in the morning. Perhaps he could clear all five level brackets in a single day.

Because he had entered the level 31 instance while still only level 30, he had gained some bonus experience. One instance had raised both him and the little fox by three levels, bringing them to level 33.

If he cleared the remaining four instances, he might reach the late Spirit-Motion stage, level 37 or above.

Using Mount Supreme Emperor as the center, Li Yunfei spent more than an hour moving through the forest along a gradually expanding series of great arcs. With the convenience of divine sense, he finally discovered a second place that seemed to be a graveyard.

This graveyard, however, differed somewhat from the previous one. Though there were mounded graves rising and falling across the ground, not a single tombstone could be seen.

Moreover, the mounds here were much smaller than those in the earlier graveyard. Weeds grew thick over them, clearly never having been cleared, and the graves were scattered in complete disorder.

That suspected graveyard lay about two li away from Li Yunfei. He condensed his divine sense into a single line and rotated it around himself, like a radar sweep.

Though this method did not allow as fine and detailed a grasp of the surrounding environment as when his divine sense radiated outward in all directions, it had the advantage of efficiency.

He was not in battle, merely looking for places. Naturally, this method offered far better value for the effort.

A short while later, Li Yunfei arrived at the spot, and the system prompt sounded right on cue.

What surprised him, however, was that this time two prompts sounded one after the other in succession.

“Attention, host: instance discovered, Mass Burial Ground, levels 36 to 40. Please select an instance level.”

“Attention, host: instance discovered, Yellow Immortal Burrow, levels 41 to 45. Please select an instance level.”

So it was a mass grave. No wonder the burial mounds looked so strange and were spread in such chaotic fashion.

The two instances perfectly covered two stages. Although neither was suitable for him to farm at present, at least he now knew where later instances would be found.

Li Yunfei’s eyes flickered. So it was a weasel grave.

The so-called Yellow Immortal likely referred to the yellow weasel, in other words the weasel clan. Those creatures truly did have a habit of making their nests in graves.

But if they were merely ordinary weasels, they obviously would not reach such a level.

Otherwise, judging by the system’s usual style, the prompt should have said, “instance discovered, weasel burrow,” because when the system named beast-type instance monsters, it generally used formal zoological names.

Since the system called it Yellow Immortal, that proved that among the weasels inhabiting this mass grave, there were already some that had become spirit creatures.

A look of delight appeared in Li Yunfei’s eyes. He wondered what kind of treasures these weasel demon beasts might drop.

As for the so-called Four Great Houses and Five Immortals of folk legend, beings one must never offend, he paid them no heed whatsoever.

They were nothing more than animals that had gained intelligence and become spirits. They might intimidate ordinary people, but before cultivators they amounted to nothing.

The so-called Four Great Houses were Hu, Huang, Bai, and Liu, corresponding respectively to foxes, weasels, hedgehogs, and snakes.

The Five Immortals added one more to those four: Hui, representing rats.

Among these Four Great Houses and Five Immortals, aside from the fox immortals—toward whom, because of the little fox, he felt affection by association and could not bear to harm—Li Yunfei did not care in the least about the other four.

Especially the Liu Immortals, the snake demons. The instance monsters formed by their kind would most likely drop weapons or magical treasures carrying deadly poison.

Among the Five Immortals, their equipment probably had the highest damage output. Next, if nothing unexpected happened, should be the Bai Immortals, the hedgehog clan.

Having farmed so many instances, Li Yunfei had already gained some insight.

The equipment dropped by beast and demon-beast instance monsters was, more often than not, related in some way to their own innate traits.

If they were hedgehog demon beasts, perhaps they would drop armor with a damage-reflection effect, or weapon treasures capable of unleashing something like a rain of flying spikes.