If I upgrade, I can win prizes

Chapter 428 Slaves
Lord Jiaohuo looked at the cave in front of him with an excited look on his face.

Carefully feeling the flow of spiritual energy in the cave, the smile on his face grew brighter.

Is this a fifth-grade cave? Is this a fifth-grade cave that can be lived in forever without rent?
Love it! Totally satisfied!

With a cave like this, I will definitely be able to break through to the middle stage of the Spirit Transformation!
According to that Taoist, as long as he made contributions, the sixth-level cave house could be opened to him! It was unknown whether he could reach the late stage of the Spiritual Transformation!

Alas, it is a pity that the "Stirring Fire and Mixing Pills Sutra" that I practice is only a fifth-level technique, and I can only practice it to the late stage of Spirit Transformation at most. Otherwise, with my spiritual root aptitude, there is still a 1% chance of impacting the Return to Void Realm.

High-level skills are hard to find, and the cost of switching to another skill is too high… Forget it, forget it, the late stage of the Spiritual Transformation is already good enough. How many people in the late stage of the Spiritual Transformation are there in the entire human-demon border?

Once I have established myself in the Xianlian Sect, I can return to Shaoyuan Domain and bring all my family members over. It is time to take revenge on my eldest brother who drugged me and tried to destroy my cultivation just for a low-grade fifth-rank cave.

But there is no rush for now. The Xianlian Sect is indeed too mysterious, and we haven't figured out what the situation is yet. It may not be a good thing to take over my hundreds of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, so let's wait and see.

Looking at the cave again, Master Jiaohuo frowned.

After all, it was once occupied by the demon race. This smell of fox is really...

Forget it, as long as there is no problem with the spirit gathering array in the cave, I should clean it well. After all, I am the head of the sect's alchemy department, and the cave should still have some style.

Although I don't know why the name of this position is so strange, but I guess it is similar to the Master of Alchemy Peak, the Master of Alchemy Palace, etc., and I am still doing my old job of alchemy.

This is already very good. I am indeed not good at fighting. Bullying Yuanying is fine, but I have no chance of winning against people of the same level.

In the previous battle, if he had not hidden himself in the family alchemy furnace and refused to come out, he would have been in great danger.

After practicing comfortably in the cave for seven or eight days, the communication magic tool that had been issued earlier on the table next to him lit up.

True Lord Jiaohuo had to stop practicing and pick up the magic weapon to check.

The above is the task assigned by the mysterious Taoist priest, asking everyone to restore order among the human race on Xianlian Island and recruit a group of disciples with excellent spiritual roots from among these humans.

This job was very familiar to Master Jiaohuo. When he was in the family before, he had done related work. He recruited talents for the family in his own territory in Shaoyuan Domain, and he was quite proficient in the spiritual root detection technique.

However, such work is usually the task of the younger ones in the Qi Refining and Foundation Building stages. Those mortals can be suppressed by any mortal in the Qi Refining stage. Why would it be necessary for a True Lord Huashen to take action?

But it doesn't matter. After all, I am now an external elder of the sect, and I am paid by the emperor. I really have to share the emperor's worries and do things well.

After a little preparation, True Lord Jiaohuo flew out of the cave and arrived at the gathering point.

He was not the only one who accepted the same task. There was also True Lord Ye Ming who was in charge of the Fire Academy, and some other external elders of the Fire Academy. Some of them were in the Nascent Soul stage and some were in the Golden Core stage. There were as many as a hundred of them, but none of them were below the Golden Core stage.

The area they are responsible for is the fire petals in the lower five of the nine lotus petals.

The regional distribution of Xianlian Island is very simple, with five elements leaves under the sea, five elements and four symbols petals on the sea, and the Hunyuan lotus in the center, a total of fifteen areas.

It is said that this time a total of nearly two thousand external elders were recruited, with more than one hundred in each region, which is almost enough.

The map left by the demon clan has been sent down through a communication device. Each area is very large. In addition to most of the areas originally occupied by the demon clan to reproduce and live, there are also many areas where the human race is kept in captivity. There are more than 300 areas on the petals of the fire character, large and small, distributed in different areas, and kept by different demon clans.

Without much to say, everyone simply made some assignments and headed to their chosen areas.

As one of the only two True Lords who had achieved the state of being a spirit, True Lord Jiaohuo was assigned to four large human settlements.

Following the instructions on the map, True Lord Jiaohuo first came to the largest city among them, named Hutun City, which previously belonged to the Yanhu clan and was a vassal of the Xuanhu clan, to which the Xuanhu Demon Emperor belonged.

This is an extremely large city, with a radius of hundreds of miles. Outside the city are large tracts of farmland, and river water has been diverted to form a moat. It looks very neat and tidy, not as dirty and messy as imagined, and there are no corpses everywhere. The streets are very clean, and it looks like an ordinary human city in the world of immortal cultivation.

The only difference is that in the center of the city, there stands a huge bronze statue more than 20 feet high, which looks like a sitting tiger.

The bronze statue seemed to be still hollow, with many ten-foot-high holes on the base. Someone was constantly adding charcoal into it, making the flames inside burn more violently. The flames came out from the holes in various places on the bronze statue, making the entire statue covered with a layer of flames, which looked indescribably majestic.

Outside the bronze statue is a huge square, flat and wide. It is now full of people kneeling, constantly kneeling in front of the tiger statue, muttering something.

After thinking about it, Master Jiaohuo did not choose to show up directly, but instead planned to take a look at the situation.

I saw a creature with yellow and black oil paint all over its body and hair of various colors lying on the ground on a small platform in front of the bronze statue of the tiger. It would jump out from time to time and roar from its mouth. It looked lifelike, as if it was a real tiger.

He danced like this for quite a while before he finally stopped. With a solemn expression, he stood high on the stage and made a gesture.

A strong young man next to him, wearing a yellow and black robe, immediately gave an order: "Bring them all up!"

Following his order, the crowd below split into several roads, and from each street, a group of strong men wearing imitation tiger-skin robes brought over children who looked to be seven or eight years old.

These young children were brought one by one to a small stone platform, on which different lights would occasionally appear.

Their movements were coordinated very skillfully. Each child stayed on the stone platform for no more than four or five seconds. Those with light would stay, and those without would be taken down directly. Several teams intertwined with each other and the testing was done very quickly. Soon, thousands of children had been tested, and more than four hundred were left behind the stone platform.

"Is this a spiritual root testing platform? It certainly looks like one, but it's too old-fashioned and not as accurate as the new instruments from the Mechanical Domain." True Lord Jiaohuo frowned, "But the Flame Tiger Clan has moved away, so why are they still testing spiritual roots? Could it be that they already knew we would come to recruit disciples?"

Not quite understanding, Master Jiaohuo continued watching.

These young children were divided into six teams according to their spiritual roots, one team for each of the five elements, and the other three children with rare spiritual roots formed a separate team.

Among them, the child with the fire spirit root who had glowed red before was brought to the front.

The priest covered in oil paint turned around and continued to pray to the bronze tiger statue: "Tiger God, have mercy on me, grant me good weather and good harvests, grant me freedom from illness and disaster, grant me... bow down to the Tiger God and offer the soul boy as a sacrifice!"

As soon as the words were spoken, the children with fire spiritual roots were guided to approach the bronze tiger statue, closer and closer.

The bronze tiger statue had already been burned red, and the children were unwilling to move forward under the huge heat, but the tiger-clad strong men showed no mercy and directly grabbed the children like chicks. Someone who looked like a parent of the child raised his head and wanted to resist, but was quickly held back by others. He fell down again and continued to kowtow with tears.

Are they going to scald these spiritual root seeds to death? Even if these children who haven't grown up are offered to monsters to eat? At least they need to cultivate for a period of time, reach a certain level, and have more spiritual power in their bodies, so that the monsters can get some help, right? It's too wasteful to do it this way now!

True Lord Jiaohuo couldn't figure out the intentions of these people, but he couldn't let these children with fire spirit roots be burned to death in vain. After all, among them might be his disciples who wanted to learn alchemy from him in the future.

Without any hesitation, he attacked immediately. His divine power instantly enveloped the entire place, suppressing everyone and making them unable to move.

After bringing these young children out of the range of the bronze statue, True Lord Jiaohuo activated the spiritual root detection technique and conducted a direct test.

I have to say, worthy of being children who grew up on the sixth-rank fairy island, these children with fire spiritual roots all have good spiritual roots. Among them there is even one top-grade fire spiritual root, and four or five high-grade fire spiritual roots, and the rest are of medium and low grades, all of which can be used.

As for the inferior ones, the old-style spirit-detecting platforms are not sensitive enough, and the inferior spiritual roots are too weak, so they generally cannot be detected, and are no different from ordinary people.

He checked the other children again and was surprised as well. He found a top-grade wood spiritual root and more than a dozen other high-grade spiritual roots. The quality was much better than when he recruited disciples in Shaoyuan Domain before.

After checking again to make sure these children did not have any demonic energy or other hidden dangers, and were just ordinary humans, Master Jiaohuo felt relieved.

This task is quite simple. Others have already prepared it for me and there is no waste of time at all.

He looked at the oil-painted priest who was presiding over the sacrifice and sensed that this guy was a very ordinary middle-grade fire spiritual root, only at the middle stage of Qi Refining. The technique he practiced was also extremely crude, and his spiritual power was weak, but he had a strong physique. He should have also practiced worldly martial arts and had almost reached the innate level.

Seeing his terrified look, Master Jiaohuo didn't intend to waste time. He teleported over and put his hand on his head.

Soul searching!
As a fifth-rank alchemist, Lord Jiaohuo's spiritual awareness was extremely strong. He quickly blocked out those meaningless luxurious enjoyments and corrupted and abnormal memories and found the key.

This guy is the leader of a cult called "Tiger God Cult". He was specially trained by the Flame Tiger Clan to help keep the human race in this area captive. He is responsible for encouraging childbirth, increasing food production, maintaining public order, selecting spiritual children every four years, and so on.

This "Tiger God Cult" has been passed down for thousands of years, and the leader of the cult has ruled this city for hundreds of years.

Today happens to be the day for selecting and offering spiritual children once every four years, but usually at this time, the Flame Tiger Clan would send a tiger demon to help, and then take all the spiritual children away.

But this time, for some reason, the tiger demon did not come. In order to ensure the smooth progress of the ceremony, the leader had to pretend to be the tiger demon himself and continue to fool the people below.

As for why the soul child was sent to the side of the bronze statue, that was the usual procedure. Usually the tiger demon would appear, relieve the burning sensation on the child's body, gain the children's favor, and then tell the believers below that he would lead them to heaven to live a better life.

However, the tiger demon did not show up today. The leader guessed that it might be because the quality of the spirit boy this time was not good enough, so he continued with the ceremony.

There was nothing to say about these demon accomplices. Lord Jiaohuo just snapped his fingers and all the Tiger God followers present were burned to ashes.

But soon, Master Jiaohuo frowned again.

Obviously, it is not a good solution to simply and crudely eliminate the puppet forces of the demon race. After all, this city still needs people to manage it. Maintaining order among the human race is also a part of the task that Daozi gave to everyone.

Oh, it seems that I really have to go back to Shaoyuan Domain. I am really not good at these things. There were many mortal cities in the family area before, and they were all controlled by the lower-level people in the family. There should be many relevant talents among my descendants.

However, if we want to completely change the thinking of these humans, it will probably be a long and arduous task...

Thinking of this, True Lord Jiaohuo stood still in the air and raised his voice: "The Tiger God is dead! The human race must strengthen itself! I will give you one month to quickly elect a city lord!"

After saying that, he simply waved his hand and melted the entire bronze tiger statue, turning it into countless tiny copper coins that scattered all over the ground.

After doing all this, True Lord Jiaohuo summoned a fire cloud magic weapon, loaded all the children with spiritual roots onto it, and headed for another human settlement.

This place is completely different from Hutun City. It is a village built on the hillside. Tall trees and mountain walls are full of messy houses. It is indescribably barbaric and primitive.

Moreover, this hill is a third-level spiritual vein with abundant spiritual energy, enough for people to cultivate to the Golden Elixir stage.

There are many people on the mountains, on the trees, and in the forests. Some are talking to each other, some are cultivating each other, some are hunting together, and there is also a small spiritual field with some spiritual herbs and flowers planted in it.

After a brief observation, I found that many people here have reached a certain level. There are many people in the Qi Refining and Foundation Building stages. I also saw four or five people in the Golden Core stage. I even saw a group of children practicing under the guidance of a teacher next to a small lake.

However, these people looked different from ordinary people. Some of them had tiger ears, some had tiger tails, some had tiger claws on their hands, and some even had their entire upper body as a tiger... Although they did speak the human language, the demonic aura on their bodies could not be hidden no matter what.

However, unlike the fierce and brutal demonic aura of the demon race, the demonic aura on them is softer.

True Lord Jiaohuo has been in the human-demon border for thousands of years and is knowledgeable. He knows that they are indeed not pure demons, but half-demons born from the union of humans and demons.

In fact, there are many such half-demons, whether in the fairyland occupied by the demon race or in the fairyland occupied by the human race.

How to say it, the time of cultivation is long, and there are always people or monsters who want to pursue some new excitement.

However, such half-demons are always at the bottom of the contempt chain no matter where they are. No tribe is willing to fully accept them. Even if they are given a method of cultivation, it will only be the crudest method.

Such half-demons simply cannot enter any human force, or the upper echelons of the demon clan. In most cases, they are just cannon fodder in the war between the two sides, and die in a meaningless war of attrition.

It is understandable that the Yanhu clan left without taking them with them. The Yanhu clan didn't know where they would wander to in the future, so why would they take these burdens with them?

After a simple remote detection, Master Jiaohuo discovered that there were indeed some half-demons with good spiritual roots, and most of them even had spiritual roots.

However, as he was unsure of the mysterious Taoist's intentions, True Lord Jiaohuo did not approach him to recruit disciples, but turned around and went to another human settlement area.

This settlement is also a city, but people inside are fighting, and countless people are lying in a pool of blood.

……

(End of this chapter)