Chapter 1770: Sacrificial Wine

Chapter 1770: Chapter 1069: Sacrificial Wine

Everyone with Sui Yi was shocked.

Baldie was stunned too and couldn’t help cursing: “The hell, who the fuck led this team?!”

“You damn Baldie, what did you say?!”

The blood aura thinned out, and only then did the two sides finally see each other.

Opposite Baldie stood a hot, curvy woman in red leather armor, glaring at him.

“Looking for a beating, huh, you damn Baldie!”

“Woman, it’s you, huh! Figures, only you women can fuck up the route so bad the North Gate people all ended up drifting over here!”

“Motherfucker!”

The two leaders didn’t say another word and went straight into a fight, and both columns of people were pissed too, trading insults and then actually brawling….

They still had some sense though, not straying off the two blood paths, so the fight was crowded as hell and all close-up hand-to-hand. That put the Mages at a real disadvantage; they had no choice but to turtle up and hide…

Sui Yi was also taken for a Mage, because she didn’t move at all, just stood in the back watching…

After an hour passed.

This path finally came to an end.

Sui Yi walked out of the exit. She lifted her eyes and saw… huge, twisted trees, banyan trees. Banyans always have tons of roots and big, sprawling trunks, digging deep into the ground and forming lots of banyan hollows, some big, some small, but even the smallest ones were big enough for people to live in.

But these banyans weren’t normal trees.

“Blood Banyan?” Sui Yi was a bit surprised. Blood Banyan was one of the strangest tree species in the world. Though it couldn’t compare in background and status to something like Primordial Origin, it was still rare as hell, because Blood Banyans could convert Martial Artists’ killing intent and baleful aura into nutrients, tempering their own material. The older a Blood Banyan, the more vicious and sinister its wood, and for cultivators who pursue strength and killing power, the hollows inside them were the most natural cultivation caves, with a “half the effort, double the results” effect on training.

But most of the traits of Blood Banyans were just rumor. In Sui Yi’s era, there were very few Blood Banyans, and they grew extremely slowly. They were one of the research topics investigated by Wizards of the Witch Spirit Court, but there’d never been much progress, simply because too few Blood Banyans could be found.

Yet here…

Sui Yi swept her gaze around. This Blood Pond area was huge, at least the size of the Purple Sky District, with at least over a hundred thousand Blood Banyans. Massive ones with root-trunks over ten meters in diameter were everywhere.

Of course, the soldiers and generals on the battlefield were everywhere too, and people passing by kept staring in this direction.

Someone whistled.

“Ha! Baldie, Violent Chick, you two really went at it hard inside the Blood Gate, huh? Look at how messed up your clothes are.”

“Not just the two of them, look at their two batches of people…”

A bunch of people burst out laughing.

The two groups coming out of the exit were still right next to each other, both sides bruised and swollen, looking utterly miserable. Violent Chick glared fiercely at Baldie and snorted coldly: “Enough already. I don’t even know what’s going on. The blood aura inside this Blood Gate got thicker and thicker, messed up the routes till they weren’t accurate at all, that’s how we crashed into each other… You’d better pray your luck’s better than mine and you don’t run into a Blood Charm Spirit…”

That line killed a lot of the teasing mood; everyone felt something was off. But no one said much more, because they were all in a hurry to lead their teams to the Blood Pond.

They called it a small pond, but the Blood Pond was huge—a hexagonal pool, the water inside blood-red. Right now there were already over a thousand people soaking in the pond. As they soaked, more and more people had a blood bubble condense around their bodies, wrapping them up and floating them out of the Blood Pond.

At each of the six corners of the hexagon stood a registrar. Wherever the blood bubble carried someone to, that registrar would write down the person’s name, extract their soul, and then give them a Blood Stele….

“Hey, Baldie? Violent Chick? You two just got out of bed or something? Must’ve been pretty intense.”

Fuck me!

Both their faces went dark, and Violent Chick had no choice but to bring it up again. Several registrars were quite surprised.

“Hm? This situation probably needs to be reported to Lord Blood Venerable, in case something really does happen…. You two teams wait a bit. The groups down there right now are pretty low quality. They’ve been in for an hour and still haven’t condensed a blood bubble. Their blood courage and mental grit are trash, just wasting our Blood Spirit Liquid and time…”

The registrar was very displeased, and the people in the pond below were embarrassed too. Someone tried to jump out of the Blood Pond, but instead was dragged deeper down.

The registrar turned and slapped him.

“Don’t move around! Or if you get pulled under you won’t float back up, you’ll just end up feed. Don’t you dare blame us for being ruthless!”

He’d barely finished saying that when the guy got even more nervous, and suddenly his body sank. Amid his screams he vanished without a trace.

“Tch, another cowardly little rat…” Baldie sneered, utterly unconcerned about the man’s death, just turning to warn Sui Yi’s group: “All of you, remember this: once you’re in the pond, don’t fucking let your mind wander. If you know you’ve got a weak stomach, step out now. It’s not that I’m afraid you’ll die; I’m afraid you’ll go down there and fucking embarrass me…”

It was a nasty thing to say, so of course no one wanted to step forward…

But Baldie’s shout did make one female registrar chuckle: “Baldie, I think your batch is pretty good. You’re all ragged as hell, but that kid in white doesn’t even have a speck of dust on him… hiding deep, isn’t he.”

Only when she said that did everyone notice Sui Yi.

“Her? Just a pretty-boy. He was hiding in the back from the start… Kid, you’re going in first later. I wanna see what you’ve got.”

Baldie pointed at Sui Yi and barked. Sui Yi didn’t get annoyed, just stared at the pond…

Blood Spirit Liquid? The baleful aura is really strong—using sha to lure sha… it can test and trigger a cultivator’s desire to fight, and it’s packed with energy too, so it counts as a nice little tonic…

If Yi and Li Luo came here, they’d probably walk away with a huge haul…

Sui Yi was thinking that, waiting, until it was their batch’s turn.

“Kid, get over here…”

Baldie barked at him without ceremony; Sui Yi still walked over, glanced at him, stepped forward, and his lower body sank in…

“Hold out a bit longer, don’t you dare embarrass your old man….”

Before Baldie could even finish, he saw that pretty-boy shut his eyes.

Yeah, that full-on feeling of being completely ignored.

Baldie choked on his words.

The violent girl burst out laughing, “Idiot!”

Then she ordered people into the Blood Pond….

One after another went down, one after another blood bubble floated up.

On the surface, Sui Yi looked just like the others, but his palm quietly spread open, pulled a handful of Blood Spirit Liquid into his body, and in the blink of an eye he dissolved that baleful aura, analyzing its structure…

After a while he came to a conclusion—the Blood Spirit Liquid has a stimulative effect on bones and bone marrow.

“The Blood Refining Stele is the core—it tempers bloodlines and condenses Bloodline Beads…. this Blood Pond is probably…”

Magnetic Sensation had already sunk to the bottom of the blood pool…

Very quickly, she found one bleeding outlet after another at the bottom—roots and stems of the Blood Banyan.

“Sure enough, the Blood Banyan’s roots spread through this entire area, maybe even beyond into regions like Azure Cloud Skies nearby, burrowing into the underground in those regions so it can absorb the blood and killing sha that seep into the soil, take them for itself, then convert them into Blood Spirit Liquid and inject it into cultivators’ bodies, like punctuation marks that can imprint on them, equivalent to a gigantic network of veins, stimulating their desire to fight and claiming their battle gains… everyone here is a mobile chess piece cultivated by it, but it’s also mutually beneficial… as for that Blood Refining Stele,….”

Sui Yi had figured out the operating structure of this Outer Domain Battlefield; he couldn’t help but marvel at how formidable it was, and grew even more wary of the authority represented by the power behind it.

“For now, focus on plundering Bloodline Beads. Don’t provoke anything more. At least for the moment it doesn’t interfere with my plans…”

Having decided, Sui Yi released the isolation he’d put on his body, simulating the physical aptitude of someone nearby… soon, the Blood Spirit Liquid accepted her as having middling potential, condensed a blood bubble, and her body floated up….

Pop, her blood bubble bumped into the blood bubble of a girl next to her and burst.

The two of them both dropped down.

Hit the ground.

And they just happened to land in the area under that female registrar’s jurisdiction. She blinked at Sui Yi: “Ah, it’s you. Your potential’s not bad, got a little blood-boiling spirit… your name is…. Sacrificial Wine is, ah, you’re Fu Shuangshuang.”

Fu Shuangshuang was that “Female Ghost” who’d slapped someone across the blood mist earlier; she glanced at Sui Yi and said, “Yeah, I’m Fu Shuangshuang… you must be the only beauty among the six registrars of the Blood Pond, Xu Rong, right?”

Xu Rong blinked. “You mean I’m a beauty because I’m the only woman, or I’m just plain a beauty?”

Fu Shuangshuang didn’t hesitate at all: “Obviously the latter; anyone with eyes can tell.”

In truth, Xu Rong’s looks were just above average; her bearing was more dignified and steady. But she was Peak of Starfall, with her strength backing her up, so she looked pretty impressive. Even so, Fu Shuangshuang’s kind of talk sounded suspiciously like flattery…

Still, the girl was cute, with a seemingly forthright temperament, not annoying at all—instead she came off as sweet-mouthed and quick-witted.

Beauty Xu Rong really did smile. “Sweet little mouth…. Truly likable. All right, the two of your life plaques will be managed under me, but I only handle your identity records. Whether you enlist or go solo for field training is up to you…”

With that said, someone behind her brought up the freshly-made Blood Stele.

Sui Yi took his own and felt a wisp of bloodline on it already linked to him.

Once you have it, your battle record can be logged….

Sui Yi turned and left.

Fu Shuangshuang followed behind.

“Hey, Sacrificial Wine, wanna team up with me? You’re a Mage, right… I’m a close-combat Blade Guest. If we join forces and stay careful, we can rack up a hundred Merit Points within a month, you know…”

A hundred Merit Points—Sui Yi knew that a single Void-breaking Level head was only worth one point, a Cloud Ascendant Level’s ten, meaning ten Cloud Ascendant heads.

That’s not a stellar record, but for two Cloud Ascendant-level fresh recruits, it was a pretty ambitious target—after all, on the Outer Domain Battlefield, everyone has to be ready at any time to become someone else’s prey.

“…I’ve got things to do, sorry.”

Even though she’d been turned down, the usually headstrong and domineering Fu Shuangshuang didn’t get mad at all—probably because the other’s gaze and tone were too gentle and refined for her to muster any anger.

“All right then, let’s at least be friends. Later we’ll have someone to look out for us. We’re all new recruits—having a friend means one more path to take.”