Cultivation begins in Qingfeng Market.

In the evening, Lin Zhao put away his fishing rod and walked towards the city gate.

Hundreds of thousands more people have joined outside the city gates.

A dark mass stretched from the foot of the city wall all the way to the distant fields.

They were all makeshift shacks, made from rags, branches, and dry grass—all the usable materials were used.

Someone started a fire, and the firelight illuminated several numb faces around them. Some people huddled in a corner holding their children, while others knelt motionless beneath the city wall, unsure whether they were asleep or dead.

The city walls were guarded by soldiers, and the arrows on the crossbow mounts were pointing out of the city.

The city gates were tightly closed; entry was not permitted.

The Three Deadly Poisons are no joke. Among these hundreds of thousands of people, countless have already been poisoned, but the effects haven't yet manifested.

If one person is let in, millions of people in the city will be buried with him. The garrison soldiers also have relatives, wives, and children.

Lin Zhao stood in the shadows outside the city gate, scanning the area with his divine sense.

Traces of the Three Deadly Poisons are everywhere. The flow of blood in many people has changed, beginning to veer towards bestiality, though the process is slow and hasn't yet reached the point of manifesting.

Lin Zhao's divine sense swept across the crowd, catching two people and pausing for a moment.

One was a young girl, about fifteen or sixteen years old, dressed in plain clothes, covered in mud. Her hair was disheveled, and her face was dusty.

Lin Zhao recognized her. In Black Rock City, in the Zhao family's library, a girl was reading late into the night. He read through all the books in the library and erased her memory.

Her name is Zhao Wan.

The other middle-aged man was her uncle, the commander of Blackrock City.

Lin Zhao had also seen him before. At the gate of Black Rock City, the disciples of the Myriad Beasts Spirit Venerable Mansion transformed into giant wolves and wreaked havoc. This commander shot an arrow through the giant wolf's demonic body from the city tower.

Later, the Church of All Souls rose to power and retaliated. Blackrock City was destroyed, and he lost an arm. He survived by sheer luck, but was left barely clinging to life.

The Zhao family was able to survive even in its decline because of his protection. Now that his uncle has fallen, the family is gone, and the city is destroyed.

Zhao Wan did not wait to die. She struggled and led her uncle through a series of hardships to escape to Xuanze City. However, they could not enter the city gate and could only wait to die.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people outside the city.

For these sect disciples, this was just a secret realm mission, and they would leave after a year.

For the mortals in the secret realm, it was a great calamity.

My home is gone, my city is gone, my family is gone, and I don't even have the choice to be a human or a demon in the future.

When a dynasty prospers, the people suffer; when a dynasty falls, the people still suffer.

Lin Zhao sighed, then suddenly opened his domain, five-colored spiritual light spreading out around him, and the illusory images of the Five Sacred Mountains appeared out of thin air.

After these days of comprehending the power of the secret realm, he has completely recovered his strength. The scope of his domain has been restored, covering an area of ​​twenty miles, encompassing hundreds of thousands of people.

Countless people looked up, instantly stunned. Some knelt down, others clutched their children tightly in their arms. The guards on the city wall froze. They had never seen anything like it; there were no magic domains in the secret realm.

Lin Zhao raised his hand and pressed down, as if the invisible Yuan energy within the Dharma Domain was being gently grasped by a large hand.

The originally violent and untamed Yuan energy calmed down in his palm. He raised his hand and turned it, and the violent Yuan energy transformed into relatively gentle spiritual energy.

Then the spiritual energy condensed into rain and fell from above the Dharma Domain.

The rain was light, fine as cow's hair, and felt cool on the skin. Each raindrop carried a faint shimmer as it fell from the sky.

Raindrops fell on mortals, their weariness disappeared, their wounds began to heal, and their chapped lips regained their color.

When it lands on a cultivator, the depleted vital energy slowly recovers, the blocked meridians are cleared, and the stagnant blood in old wounds dissipates.

Hundreds of thousands of people stood in the rain, heads tilted back, mouths agape. Some cried, some laughed, some knelt on the ground and kowtowed, some hugged the people around them and wailed.

"A deity—it's a deity—"

"Thank God!"

"Help! Help me!"

Some people knew of the existence of cultivators, so they knelt even deeper, their foreheads hitting the ground until they bled, but they didn't stop.

But there are some people to whom the spiritual rain does not fall.

An invisible power emanated from their bodies, keeping the spirit rain at bay.

Demonic poison.

The Three Deadly Poisons can corrode spiritual power, creating forbidden zones within the domain.

The spiritual rain was swallowed up as it fell, and the spiritual light dimmed, distorted, and disappeared there.

Those who were poisoned were kept at a distance by both ordinary people and cultivators, as if they were avoiding a plague.

No one dared to approach; those infected by the demonic poison would eventually turn into demons. This was the consensus among everyone in the secret realm.

Zhao Wan and her uncle were among them.

The girl stood at the edge of the crowd, holding her uncle with both hands. Her uncle leaned on her shoulder, his face dark. The wound on his severed left arm had reopened, and blood was seeping from the bandage, dark red and black.

Zhao Wan watched as the people around her avoided them like the plague, her lips moved slightly, but she ultimately kept them closed.

Lin Zhao glanced at her, then pressed down on her with his hand.

The domain changed, transforming into an invisible force that precisely targeted the demonic poison within each poisoned individual.

The demonic poison inside these people is resisting, condensing into a layer of black mist on their bodies.

The mist churned and struggled, trying to spread and escape, but the pressure of the domain held it firmly in place, preventing it from moving an inch.

Then the spiritual energy began to penetrate into the interior of the demonic poison, dismantling and destroying it from the smallest structure.

The bloodline mutation was severed, the demonic poison was stripped away and then uprooted, the strange phenomena of the demonic poison began to subside, and black blood energy emerged from the surface of those people's bodies.

It was crushed by the power of the Dharma Domain as soon as it left the skin, turning into green smoke, and then washed away, purified and carried away by the spiritual rain.

The rain fell again.

This time, it finally happened to everyone.

Zhao Wan felt something being drawn out of her body, then the spiritual rain fell, her uncle's breathing became steady, the wound on his severed arm stopped bleeding, and his face slowly regained a sliver of color from its ashen appearance.

Hundreds of thousands survived, and an even louder cheer erupted from the crowd.

Lin Zhao shook his head. Although the cultivators in the Luo Tian Secret Realm have various inheritances left by the Luo Tian Sect, their methods are actually far inferior to those of immortal cultivators.

Lin Zhao withdrew his gaze, and the domain of law receded like a tide.

He turned and left.

When Zhao Wan looked up, she only saw a back view. The back view seemed familiar, as if she had seen it somewhere before.

She remembered that night in the library, when she fell asleep at the table and dreamed that someone was standing in front of the bookshelf flipping through her books. The person's back in the dream looked just like that.

She wasn't sure, or she might have remembered it wrong.

When Lin Zhao entered the city gate, the guards made way for him.

As he walked through the city streets, he was still recalling the methods he had just used: transforming Yuan Power into Spiritual Power within the Law Domain, forcibly altering the characteristics of the Three Absolute Demon Poisons, and then crushing and destroying them.

This has already exceeded the scope of the Core Formation realm.