Stealing the Red Lotus

This palm strike lacked the destructive power of the Samadhi True Fire, but the myriad lights of homes, condensed from human obsessions, were precisely what countered evil spirits and demons. The Black Mountain Demon felt a warm, radiant light envelop his chest, instantly stagnating his demonic energy by a full thirty percent. He was sent flying backward, his back slamming against the rock wall, creating a spiderweb-like network of cracks.

Liu Jin glanced down at the Crimson Lotus Spear in his hand. The karmic fire at the spear tip still flickered weakly, the dark red flames licking at his palm, trying to burn away the merit and popularity on his body. But his body was no longer mortal; after being forged from fragments of reality, his physical foundation was no longer within the causal system of this world.

The karmic fire burns away karma, but it doesn't reach him. He slightly tightened his fingers, and the Samadhi True Fire on the spear shaft spread to the spear tip, completely enveloping that wisp of red lotus karmic fire. He didn't rush to refine it, but simply sealed it in the spear tip for later use.

The Black Mountain Demon rose from the pile of rubble, a trickle of dark red demonic blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. He stared at the ghostly blue flame between Liu Jin's brows and the flowing silver-white robes around him, suddenly realizing his mistake: this cultivator's most powerful technique wasn't the Myriad Lights. That was merely one of his many flames.

He possessed at least two entirely different flames: one utterly yin and gentle, the other utterly fierce and powerful. The tree demon's last divine sense, passed to its ally before its death, was not wrong; this was a monster, not a human. His rage finally overwhelmed his reason, and he roared deafeningly to the sky. His entire body began to swell and deform, his black cloak tore apart, revealing bulging black muscles beneath, and countless dark red runes appeared on his skin, densely covering his entire body.

His body swelled from the size of a normal person to nearly ten feet tall, a pair of curved black horns sprouted from his head, his hands transformed into claws the size of palm fans, and his feet pounded on the stone slab, causing two deep pits to appear in the cracks. The fugitive from the underworld, with five hundred years of cultivation, revealed his true form at this moment.

Liu Jin also released the Taiyin Gauze Robe. The silver-white gauze robe fell off his body, revealing his true form, which was fully unfolded under the Reverse Life Triple Transformation. His translucent Qi-transformed body shimmered with a pale golden luster in the twilight where moonlight and sunlight met. The dark blue Samadhi True Fire burned fiercely between his brows, and blue and yellow intertwined firework ribbons floated from his fingertips, slowly rotating around him.

Without any further movement, he simply raised his right hand towards the Black Mountain Demon. In his palm, the pale golden light of countless lights slowly coalesced; at his fingertips, the eerie blue flame of Samadhi True Fire burned quietly; at the end of the ribbon, the pale yellow light of the Lingzhi Demon Fire and the silvery-white light of the Taiyin Fire intertwined. Four flames, four colors, simultaneously illuminated the same hand.

The Black Mountain Demon roared and charged forward, brandishing its sharp claws. Liu Jin met it head-on, and the two collided in mid-air, the resulting shockwave scattering rocks from the mountaintop. One relied solely on demonic energy and brute force, each claw capable of tearing through rock; the other wielded fire as a blade and qi as his body.

The four types of flames switched in turn, each switch perfectly countering the opponent's current demonic art. When Black Mountain used Yin energy, Liu Jin countered with the myriad lights of a thousand homes; when Black Mountain used brute force, Liu Jin met it head-on with Samadhi True Fire; when Black Mountain tried to use demonic wind to sweep away the ribbons, the Yin Fire froze the wind into ice crystals that fell to the ground. The two fought from the mountaintop to mid-air, and from mid-air to the rock walls, causing rocks to crumble and trees to fall wherever they went. All the demons of Black Mountain felt the terrifying fluctuations emanating from the mountaintop.

Zhao Fengnian was fighting a group of demon generals halfway up the mountain when he heard a loud bang from the mountaintop. Looking up, he saw the Black Mountain Demon in its true form as a giant demon. He looked down at the dark red scales on his arm, stained with demon blood, and then at the few trembling little demons beside him, and grinned.

The Gluttony Seal activated at full power, unleashing dozens of dark red threads that precisely pierced the wounds of several injured demon generals nearby, continuously channeling demonic essence into his dantian. The fire on his scales grew increasingly bright, changing from deep red to blazing white, then from blazing white to ghostly blue—the color of Samadhi True Fire. His scales began to reorganize themselves, becoming more layered from their previous scattered distribution, with the scales on either side of his shoulder blades being particularly dense, vaguely forming a pair of wing-like outlines yet to unfold.

He tried to activate the Qi fire within his dantian, and the scales on the wing-shaped outline lit up simultaneously. Although he still couldn't fly, his burst of speed was twice as fast as before. He punched a centipede demon away, used the recoil to leap onto a protruding rock wall, and howled towards the mountaintop.

At the mountaintop, the Black Mountain Demon, panting heavily, confronted Liu Jin, his dark red eyes fixed on the four-colored flames swirling around Liu Jin's body. He stared for a long time, then suddenly threw his head back and laughed wildly, the sound of his laughter causing rocks to fall from the mountainside.

He finally understood that the cultivator before him wasn't practicing fire-based techniques at all; he himself was a ball of fire, a living person who had transformed himself into a body of flame. And the kid who was wreaking havoc halfway up the mountain, covered in scales and growing stronger by devouring demon blood, wasn't following any proper esoteric path either.

"You two, how much of a human being do you still have?" The Black Mountain Demon's laughter abruptly stopped, his voice becoming low and seductive. "One of you has refined yourself into fire, and the other is covered in scales. Do you even consider yourselves human? You help mortals slay demons and monsters, but will they be grateful to you? No. They will fear you, fear the fire, fear the scales, fear everything they cannot understand. You will never be heroes in the human world; you will always be outcasts. Just like me back then. I served as a ghost messenger in the underworld for five hundred years, handling countless cases and capturing countless evil spirits, only to be pushed out as a scapegoat because of a wrongful conviction. The way my colleagues looked at me wasn't gratitude, but rather the feeling of finally being rid of a burden. All spirits and monsters under heaven are one family. Although the tree demon died, at least she knew she was a demon; she wouldn't grow scales while serving mortals. You've cultivated to this point; don't you understand that you no longer belong to the human world? Come to the demon race. With your abilities, you're more than capable of being a demon king; why take the fall for those ants?"

Liu Jin remained silent. This wasn't the first time he'd heard such words; the tree demon had used the same excuse before its death. Too lazy to waste any more words on a stubborn old demon, he simply rammed into it with his physical body. His Qi Transformation Body, at the third level of the Reverse Life Triple Realm, consumed almost no time over short distances, and he transformed into a pale golden afterimage, crashing heavily into the Black Mountain Demon's arms.

Blue flames surged into Liu Jin's body through his fist, causing Black Mountain to convulse in pain. Its claws instinctively lashed out at Liu Jin's shoulder, but only left a faint white mark on his Qi-transformed skin. Black Mountain's other claw gripped the Crimson Lotus Spear, attempting a sneak attack. The karmic fire at the spear tip enveloped Liu Jin's forearm, the dark red flames desperately trying to penetrate his skin, but failing to even burn through the outermost layer of Qi-transformed skin.