The Abyss

"Are you all right?"

Qiao Xue couldn't help Mu Yu for the pain still bothered her and restricted her ability to collect spiritual energy.

"God damn it, you insects!" Mu Yu howled.

Mu Yu discharged a potent green vitality from his body shocking the fiend souls off him and erasing the spooky ambience in the cave. The wood spirit ejected from Shadow Splitter. The green wood spirit followed the fleeing fiend souls.

"Punctured Sword, vanquish them!" raged Mu Yu.

The wood spirit hovering in the air sent out vitality breakers. It healed Mu Yu and company. Meanwhile, the holes in it fired green beams that sucked the fiend souls into the holes. The fiend souls put up a fruitless struggle. The vitality was the greatest nourishment they could've asked for, yet it was their undoing if it exceeded the potency that they could store. As previously, the fiend souls absorbed sealed the holes in the sword. Once its mission was complete, it fused with Shadow Splitter again.

"What's that?" Qiao Xue sat up and inquired.

Mu Yu still felt exhausted after wrestling with the fiend souls. He grouched, "Damn thing should've helped from the beginning. Why did I have to put up with all that biting?"

Little did Mu Yu realise he should've been grateful to be the only human to survive fiend souls gnawing at them.

"The sword seems special."

"It's just junk I happened to change upon. What's next?"

Mu Yu came to learn the tree elder didn't give him the full story behind the sword because the elder claimed he needed to take cultivators' lives to repair the damaged sword, yet Mu Yu just witnessed it repair itself using fiend souls.

Qiao Xue had her suspicions about Mu Yu's answer but figured he would dodge the questions. She readjusted her breathing and rose to her feet. "We have no choice but to venture into the abyss."

"All right, then," Mu Yu drawled. "Let's rest for an hour before continuing. We should be able to heal by then if we consider the spiritual qi's potency here."

The crew were extra careful on their way out of the cave. Instead of jumping, they slowly descended into the dark abyss on their swords. The horde of fiend souls Qiao Xue alerted were the patrol fiend souls of the abyss. Incorrectly defusing the formation without Mu Yu's wood spirit was a recipe for disaster.

"Something's strange," Xiaoshuai remarked.

Their flying swords' light didn't provide much vision in the darkness because they dimmed them. They assumed a back-to-back position to keep surveillance. Mu Yu noticed a dark red flash of light and asked, "What's that flashing thing?"

"If I'm correct, it's a bloodbat," Qiao Xue whispered.

"I guess you're right. They love dark places, after all."

Bloodbats were level three fiend beasts. Their right eyes were just for show. Their voices had the potential to invoke illusions. One bloodbat might not be lethal, but once thousands of them gathered, it spelt trouble.

The trio avoided the bloodbats. It was best not to engage in combat in terrain they weren't familiar with. They had descended for two hours, yet the base was still nowhere in sight. The boodbats didn't attack them, but they came across more and more.

"Don't tell me this leads to hell," Mu Yu muttered.

Tap! Mu Yu's foot hit something hard below him, leading to him rebounding back up. Luckily, they were moving slow.

"What the heck?" cursed Mu Yu, unable to go any further. He crouched down to see they were still in the air, yet something prohibited their advance.

"A boundary barrier?" Qiao Xue stored away her magic item and released spiritual energy. She took a few steps to the left and came back.

"It must be the formation's boundary. We can't go up or down." Mu Yu gave the boundary a few knocks.

"Careful, don't alert the bloodbats."

"The honey pea aroma is coming from the right. The right!"

Mu Yu and Qiao Xue gave each other a nod and then proceeded to the right. Their footsteps were audible. Hence, they opted to fly.

The width of the abyss was approximately two hundred metres. The wall to the right was coarse, cold and moist. There were no bloodbats within the vicinity.

"There's nothing here," said Qiao Xue.

"No, there is something odd." Mu Yu lighted up the wall. He ran his finger across the wall then moved back to take in the bigger picture. "It's a stone door."

Elated, Qiao Xue moved back to stand side by side with Mu Yu. "Can you describe the outline of the door?"

Mu Yu drew a rectangle on the wall using his sword. The door was roughly five metres wide and twelve metres tall. At the very top, there was a carving of a savage… fiend beast? The savage look knocked a year or two off his life.

"How do we open it?"

Mu Yu kept his sword on the fiend beast carving. He didn't know the name of the fiend beast, but he illustrated it as a gorilla with a fang extending all the way down to its jaw.

A look of disbelief came to Qiao Xue's face. "Mm… I know how to open it."

"How?"

The door was too heavy to knock down physically. Further, the bloodbats would spring if they made a ruckus.

Carrying a disgusted undertone in her voice, Qiao Xue responded, "Second Heaven's primitive fiend race likes sacrifices."