Starting as a stray dog, I embarked on a journey of cultivation.

Gou An fed Long Youzi a Qi-strengthening pill.

As the pill entered his stomach, the man's aura quickly stabilized, and he slowly opened his eyes.

The moment he regained consciousness, as if remembering something, he quickly sprang to his feet, looking wary.

But when he saw that he was in a cave and only Gou An was sitting on one side, he calmed down.

"Master, where is this?"

Long Youzi quickly pressed for more information.

"Don't worry, this is still the Monster Mountain Range. I just found a place to rest!" Gou An played with a high-grade spirit stone in his hand and slowly absorbed the spiritual energy in the stone to increase his demon power.

"What on earth happened? Why did the corpse explode?" Only then did Long Youzi realize that he was covered in blood. He quickly took off his outer clothes and threw them aside. Then he took out a new one from his storage bag and put it on.

After doing all that, he still felt a little dizzy and unconsciously rubbed his temples.

"It was Lord Jinyang..." Gou An began, recounting what had happened afterward.

However, some information was concealed. He only told Long Youzi that he had cooperated with the giant python to kill Lord Jinyang, without revealing anything about Xuan Kongzi, the Heavenly Diagram, or using Lord Jinyang's body as a puppet.

"What?!" Upon learning that Gou An had actually killed one of the Guardians of the Nation, Long Youzi's eyes widened in disbelief. "How is this possible? Master, how could you kill a Guardian of the Nation? He was a powerful demon at the Nascent Soul stage!"

"You must be joking with me, right?"

In the end, Long Youzi still had doubts.

"I'm not kidding!" Gou An casually pulled out a storage bag he had prepared beforehand, containing 20,000 spirit stones, and tossed it to Long Youzi, saying, "These are your spoils!"

"Mine?" Long Youzi took the storage bag and was shocked when he saw it.

For a small, independent cultivator like him, 20,000 spirit stones was a huge sum of money.

"Master, where did you get so many spirit stones?" Long Youzi felt uneasy.

"Naturally, it was obtained after killing Lord Jinyang!" Gou An's lips curled slightly. "This is your share."

"Give it to me?" Long Youzi glanced down at the storage bag in his hand, his face turning pale with fright. "Master, I didn't attack the Protector of the Nation! I knew nothing about it."

"Hey!" Gou An shook his head. "We're in the same boat now. If you don't believe I could kill Huguo on my own, how can anyone else believe it?"

At this point, Gou An smirked again: "What if we added you to the mix? Although you're not particularly skilled either, which do you think is more likely—one person taking action versus two people?"

Long Youzi swallowed hard, immediately realizing that he couldn't escape the involvement in this matter.

"Then what do we do?" Long Youzi seemed even more flustered, his hands holding the storage bag trembling slightly.

"Fortunately, no one was watching when I killed Lord Jinyang!" Gou An said slowly, "So even if the City of Ten Thousand Demons discovers that something happened to him, they won't suspect us for the time being."

"That's good!" Long Youzi breathed a sigh of relief.

"The only problem is that Lord Jinyang has quite a few things on him that need to be dealt with!" Gou An said, casually pouring out a bunch of magical artifacts of different grades from his storage bag, which looked dazzling.

"So many?" Long Youzi was even more shocked when he saw these things.

"There's a lot, but we can't use it!" Gou An said. "Using it would easily backfire, so we need to get rid of it!"

At this point, Gou An looked at Long Youzi and smiled, "You're more familiar with the outside world than I am, so you should know how to deal with these things, right?"

"This..." Long Youzi fell into deep thought after hearing this.

After a moment, he seemed to remember something and then said, "I have heard of a place, but I have never been there."

"Where?" Gou An immediately asked.

"Its name is the Formless Black Market!" Long Youzi blurted out, then went on to explain in detail: "This place is very mysterious. I heard that anyone who enters this place needs to buy black market masks and robes to completely conceal their identity, whether they are buyers or sellers."

"The black market sells a wide variety of things, including pills, cultivation techniques, magic weapons, and intelligence.

"The biggest rule inside is that you never ask where a item comes from or where it is going when you buy or sell it, making it the perfect place to sell stolen goods."

"Most importantly, the Black Market Lord, Wuxiang Xian, is a powerful figure with the cultivation of the Nascent Soul stage. No one dares to cause trouble in the Black Market."

"If anyone causes trouble, Wuxiang Immortal will directly eliminate them."

After hearing Long Youzi's description, Gou An immediately became interested: "If that's true, then we'll have to go to this place."

"But Master, I don't know where this place is!" Long Youzi smiled awkwardly, "I only heard about it once when I was traveling before."

"It's alright, let's go look for it together!" Gou An rubbed his chin and pondered, "Now that Lord Jin Yang has just died, we don't know if he had a life lamp. If his life lamp goes out, the city will surely be in chaos."

"Since we've taken leave to look for spiritual materials, we can take this opportunity to visit this Formless Black Market."

"The remaining two spiritual materials I need can probably be bought directly from here, so we don't have to spend time searching for them."

At this point, Gou An turned his gaze back to Long Youzi: "Even if you don't know the exact location, you must know somewhere where you can find out, right?"

After pondering for a moment, Long Youzi nodded: "I do know someone who should know where the Wuxiang Black Market is."

"Let's go!" Gou An put away his storage bag. "Let's set off now!"

"That's within the territory of human cultivators!" Long Youzi looked at Gou An with some concern.

Gou An simply smiled and said, "It's alright, I have my own ways of concealing myself."

Seeing that Gou An had said so, Long Youzi had no choice but to nod: "We need to go east. There is a city called Xiangdong City. I have an old friend who has been to the Wuxiang Black Market. We can ask him to take us there."

Gou An flipped his hand and pulled out a flying boat, asking, "What are we waiting for? Let's go now!"

Seeing Gou An's attitude, Long Youzi knew he couldn't persuade him otherwise, so he had no choice but to lead the way out of the cave.

Then, the human and the demon boarded a flying boat and soared into the sky, flying at high speed in the direction that Long Youzi had indicated.