How Much For Your Soul?

Chapter 33

After taking control of the City, Su Qiang reformatted the City Guards. They were made up of volunteers from all Families and commoners. Su Qiang selected a hundred senior members and brought them to Shen Yue to be branded with his new slave seal.

The hundred new Guard Captains would be responsible for recruiting, branding and matching a cultivation technique for new recruits to train with. Shen Yue had created basic cultivation techniques for each attribute, suitable for the majority of most soul forms. Any rare forms and talents would be singled out for special treatment.

With the new City Guards being formed, Shen Yue also introduced his death puppet, Ye Yan, to Su Qiang. After being thoroughly brainwashed, Ye Yan was inserted into Ziyun's soul puppet when she regained her body. With a suitable back story, he was introduced as the founder of Glory City and made Su Qiang's position as City Lord secure. He also made a great advisor or messenger.

With the Snow Wind Family booted from the City Lord's Mansion, it would be a week before they could clean out their belongings and treasures. Su Qiang now had time to brand his Celestial Brotherhood members. After they were branded, the seal restricting their cultivation would be released. They could now attain the exalted rank of legend.

Shen Yue was quite confident in Su Qiang's ability to implement his plans to the City, and with Ye Yan to help, there was no need for him to stick around. Besides, he was now busy playing with his new toy. The men he had sent to the Dark Ruins had finally returned, and they had found the Nightmare Demon Pot. They had also cleared the area of demon spirits as nightmare demon beasts were quite rare.

After a quick scan by his overpowered library, Shen Yue could not help but be amazed by Nie Li's stupidity. It seems that whoever created the Nightmare Demon Pot, did so to evolve demon spirits. If you created an artifact to help you develop demon spirits, would you leave it to chance? No, there were basic rules that even a novice would be able to work out with trial and error.

Nie Li was simply an idiot. Even after knowing that using demon spirits of the same attribute increases the success rate, he then completely ignores that and grades them as fighter or assassins type spirits. What a moron! He even knew that there were different levels of cultivation for demon spirits, but still tossed them in randomly expecting a good result!

The cultivation levels are the same as humans, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Black-Gold, Legend and so on. The growth levels, which is the most essential characteristic of a demon spirit, are Poor, Ordinary, Good, Excellent, Extraordinary and God levels.

Even before reading the information on the Nightmare Demon Pot, Shen Yue could safely assume that if you wanted to raise the growth level of an ordinary, silver ranked fire demon spirit, you would use bronze fire demon spirits with a poor growth rate. This would ensure that the specific demon spirit effortlessly devours the other ones increasing its rank. Of course, you would have to keep the levels close, as using weak demon spirits to evolve a strong demon spirit would not achieve much growth.

Basic common sense and the three-hundred-year-old Nie Lie could not work it out, destroying thousands of demon spirits when they exploded from being incompatible. The next thing that he failed at was not controlling the merger of demon spirits. He simply shoved soul force into the pot and hoped for the best! Although he found this out after operating the pot thousands of times when he created the mutated dragon demon spirit.

Shen Yue was glad he did not have to rely on the dumb arse like the trollop. He could only imagine the trouble he will get her into when they go to the Draconic Realm. Shen Yue was going to try his best to keep him from entering the Divine Feathers Sect, he didn't need the fool bumbling around and ruining his plans. Hopefully, Nie Li will forget about the Tiny World and concentrate on the Sage-Emperor. If he comes looking for trouble, Shen Yue had no qualms about ending him and the hypocrite from Earth.

The last thing that influenced the success rate was the condition of the Nightmare Demon Pot. This was another rookie mistake for the self-proclaimed master, Nie Li. When he first injected soul force into the pot, he felt a connection and watched as the pot shined. After subsequent uses with stronger dragon bloodline demon spirits, he noticed that the pot's appearance changed. It started to glow scarlet red and a mysterious pattern gradually formed on its surface.

Blind Freddie could have told him that the pot needed to be nourished with soul force, practically every artifact he came across needed to be! One of the Myriad Miles Rivers and Mountains Painting's functions is to provide artifacts with Heavenly Energy to strengthen them, it's such a basic detail to miss from someone that has reached the peak of cultivation.

When Nie Li found the space where the pot stores it's Heavenly Energy, he even pillaged it for his own cultivation! Absolute retard! For the sake of a quick power gain, he would have to sacrifice thousands of spirit stones to buy demon spirits that were lost because of the loss of strength of the artifact. Shen Yue would not be making these mistakes.

Since it took too long to advance from a 1-Fate Heavenly Fate to a 2-Fate purely using Heavenly Energy from the atmosphere, Shen Yue had cycled them out so every legend expert could condense a Fate Soul. Now that the majority had, he had them pumping Heavenly Energy into the Nightmare Demon Pot. With thousands of experts taking turns to inject the pot with much-needed nourishment, there was no drop in power for them.

While the pot was being nourished, Shen Yue was organising the thousands of demon spirits into different attributes, levels and growth rates. He had not really been bothered about contracting a demon spirit before now, preferring to wait until he could combine and mutate god growth demon spirits.

Although the Shadow Devil had a god level growth rate, it did not have extra powers or a presence like the Fanged Panda that Nie Li created. Shen Yue held off integrating with it until he could boost its abilities with the Nightmare Demon Pot.

Shen Yue also liked the idea of merging laws to enhance his demon spirits and had already made plans to travel to the Heavenly Fate Plateau to finally release the Fire Spiritual Goddess. Adding another beauty to his harem would also be welcomed.

Since his new slave seal, his women had meshed together without any snide comments or evil looks. He had no idea how people had harems without slavery, it would take momentous amounts of patience and diplomacy!

When the Demon Spirits had been sorted into different levels and grades, his next task was to choose the spirits worthy of being upgraded. Shen Yue had twenty-nine slots for demon spirits but was only planning to integrate a few to start with. When he improves their level, they will have more power to fight for control, and he was not prepared to risk damage to his soul realm just to fill up the empty slots.

Besides, they would absorb some of the Heavenly Energy he receives when cultivating, making it harder to level his soul realm. It already took several times the amount of soul force needed to reach the next level thanks to his multiple attributes absorbing the Qi for their own domains. Adding a demon spirit would only add to the cost.

For now, Shen Yue would only mutate his Shadow Devil Demon Spirit which was of the Dark attribute, the Sacred Flaming Condor from Shen Hong of the Sacred Fire attribute and an Earth attribute Black Scaled Earth Dragon demon spirit. These demon spirits would give him a decent range of fighting techniques from air to close range.

While the Nightmare Pot was being pumped full of energy, Shen Yue took the time to continue cultivating. If he didn't need to split the Qi into twenty-nine parts, he would have already reached the Heavenly Fate Realm. But time was easy to sacrifice when you had a cheat item that sped up time in another realm! The only problem was that the physical body of his wives and himself were growing faster than the children his age.

It would be easily noticed if he was still among his school mates, but thankfully he rarely went out in public. If anyone raised the issue, he would just throw the blame on his reliable patsy, Voldemort. The trollop will hopefully think Voldemort just had a method of bringing others to the Violet Jade Immortal Realm.

A month later in Glory City and the occupants of the City Lord's Mansion had changed. The City Guards had seen a tremendous rise in strength and the Brotherhood members had started to break through to the legend rank. The City had pretty much become impenetrable to all those under spiritual God rank.

Demigod ranked experts could be taken down by legend ranks ganging up on them, but Spiritual Gods could kill three hundred legend rank experts with ease. With the added inscription arrays to the outside wall defences, they now only had to fear Spiritual Gods.

The four Exploratory teams had also set out to conquer new land for the Nemesis Family. Of course, it was kept as low key as possible, but moving a hundred thousand people was hard to keep quiet. Su Qiang used his authority as City Lord to squash rumours. He gave the vague excuse of military exercises of new Guard troops. As people could not explain men and women popping out of nowhere from within the City, they could only speculate.

Shen Yue had finally reached the peak of legend rank and decided it was time to improve some demon spirits. During his time relaxing in Glory City, he had an epiphany of how to cut back on some of the demon spirit expenditure and maybe gain some added benefits.

Nie Li only ever used low-level demon spirits to upgrade demon spirits growth. What would happen if he used all legend ranked demon spirits? How would they mutate and would it save destroying thousands just to obtain one god growth demon spirit? Shen Yue was about to find out as he had his men integrate demon spirits just to raise their rank.

His men had been continuously pumping the Nightmare Demon Pot full of soul force and yesterday, after so long, it had finally revealed the glowing inscription pattern that Nie Li had witnessed. Shen Yue had asked his wives what types of demon spirits they had wanted, and after a couple of days, they had given him their requests.

Shen Yue entered his realm with the people chosen to cultivate this session and sat down to make this pot work some magic. He did not want to use his chosen demon spirits first, so he decided to do some test runs.

Grabbing nine demon spirits with poor growth and legend ranked cultivation with Fire attributes, he tossed them into the pot with an ordinary growth one with the same characteristics. Injecting his soul force into the pot, he felt a connection. Using his soul force to surround the demon spirit with the ordinary growth, he prompted it to start devouring the other demon spirits.

It was a quick process, and he only had to fend off an attacker once during a merging. The other demon spirits were content to devour the other spirits of the same level, leaving the strongest till last. When there was only one demon spirit left beside the spirit he was controlling, energy levels within the pot started to fluctuate.

This was easily contained when he surrounded both the spirits with his soul force and forced them to merge. This must have been where Nie Li always failed, if only he used his brain and utilised the pot as it was supposed to be used, he would have saved himself millions. With a flash of light, the lid was removed and the demon spirit stored in one of the empty demon spirit stones.

Shen Yue inspected the upgraded ordinary growth demon spirit and was delighted to see that it had skipped a level and become an Excellent growth demon spirit. After experimenting another ten times, Shen Yue was confident that having a stronger demon spirit would help it improve its growth level faster. In these test runs, he had only nearly failed once, but it was when he produced a god level growth demon spirit.

It seemed that with a bit of care in choosing compatible demon spirits, the failure rate would be minuscule. With a new found confidence, Shen Yue started producing god level growth demon spirits for himself and his wives.

Since he had plenty of time, he would also have to start supplying his officers with suitable demon spirits. The common demon spirits would be sacrificed to enhance the unique and rare ones.

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