This Sword Cultivator is Somewhat Dependable

"I'll head to Lingxu Tower right away to pull up the relevant intel on Demon Spirit Palace," Dantai Qingrun said with brisk efficiency. "Wait here for a moment."

Lu Qingshan nodded.

In a flash, Dantai Qingrun's figure blurred, and she had already drifted away.

Lu Qingshan turned around only to see Qin Yitian frowning slightly, lost in thought, and couldn't help asking, "What are you thinking about, to be so engrossed?"

"I am just wondering why it took her half a year to fail to think of it, yet you needed only a moment to see through it," Qin Yitian's eyes shined with a hint of admiration in his voice.

Lu Qingshan chuckled wryly and didn't feign being profound in front of Qin Yitian, "Actually, I just have a bit more experience than Dantai Qingrun and think things through a little more thoroughly, that's all. The actual gap isn't nearly as big as it seems."

After a pause, Lu Qingshan explained, "Simply put, I have access to far more information than she does."

The more information one has, the easier it becomes to find the key points within an issue.

.......

In the Nine Heavens game of my past life, the most famous instance commissioned by Lingxu House was from this Demon Spirit Mountain Range.

It was called the Demon Spirit Tomb.

As a massive instance spanning three houses, the Demon Spirit Tomb's update came with a special expansion pack that provided a detailed background introduction:

The founder of the Demon Spirit Palace, the Gengjin Tiger King, had created for himself an extremely lavish tomb as his prime approached its end.

In addition, the Gengjin Tiger King brought the spoils he had plundered from the Qing State over a thousand years into the tomb as funerary objects, among which was even the presence of a Human Race Immortal Codex.

This is also why the unruly Demon Beasts, even after the death of Gengjin Tiger King, some remained to continue the legacy of the Demon Spirit Palace.

They were not loyally devoted to the Demon Spirit Palace but purely lusted for the Demon Spirit Tomb.

The treasures amassed by the Gengjin Tiger King over a millennium of ravaging the Qing State were unimaginably terrifying.

Moreover, with the Gengjin Tiger King's Fifth Grade pinnacle realm, even the bones of his entire body were valuable Spirit Materials.

As long as one could enter the Demon Spirit Tomb, all these treasures would be at one's fingertips. How could the well-informed Demon Beasts not be moved by the thought?

The problem, however, was that the Gengjin Tiger King knew the greedy nature of Demon Beasts, so no one was informed of the exact location of his tomb.

The Demon Beasts of the Demon Spirit Palace only knew that the Demon Spirit Tomb was located within the Demon Spirit Mountain Range.

With the range as vast as it was, finding a hidden tomb within it was no easy task, was it?

Thus, after trying fruitlessly to locate it on a grand scale, most of the Demon Beasts from the Demon Spirit Palace quickly gave up on the idea of the Demon Spirit Tomb and left the Palace to live their carefree lives.

Latterly, there even arose such a belief—the location of the Demon Spirit Tomb was merely a ruse released by the Gengjin Tiger King; in fact, it didn't exist within the Demon Spirit Mountain Range at all.

As time passed, due to the long lack of any discovery of the Demon Spirit Tomb, gradually, this claim became the prevailing belief.

That is, until this year, when the Demon Spirit Tomb emerged out of nowhere, and others realized that in fact the Demon Spirit Palace had found the tomb within the Demon Spirit Mountain Range during the last century of the Chang'an Years. They simply had been unable to break through the tomb's numerous constraints to plunder the treasure, hence their silence.

Latterly, the Demon Spirit Palace played all their cards and finally lifted the restrictions of the Demon Spirit Tomb.

What nobody expected was that at the moment the constraints were lifted, the Demon Spirit Tomb erupted into a tumultuous uproar that the Demon Spirit Palace couldn't conceal.

Thus, news of the emergence of the Demon Spirit Tomb spread instantly throughout the lands of the three prefectures, attracting the attention of all sects in the region.

What made it even more peculiar was that the Gengjin Tiger King had possessed overwhelming combat power and a Slaughter Intent that had reached an extreme state, nearly materializing into a tangible existence.

Even though the king had perished, the residual power of its Slaughter Intent still lingered; any high-rank cultivator who rashly entered the Demon Spirit Tomb would be viewed as an enemy by the lingering intent of the Gengjin Tiger King and come under attack.

With the Gengjin Tiger King at the pinnacle of the Fifth Grade, the strongest cultivators within the three prefectures were only at the Nascent Soul Stage and could not dare to match its edge, which is why no high-rank cultivators dared to enter the tomb.

On the other hand, cultivators below the Nascent Soul Stage, due to their relatively weaker strength, were like mere ants to the Gengjin Tiger King, and thus could avoid the attacks of this Slaughter Intent.

Under the pressure of numerous cultivators and demon beasts making their way to the site, the Demon Spirit Palace could no longer monopolize the Demon Spirit Tomb, and they had to open it up for all cultivators to explore together.

...

Under these circumstances, the Demon Spirit Tomb became an open-instance dungeon for all players, a massive dungeon catering to cultivators from the Foundation Establishment Stage to the Golden Core Stage.

Furthermore, as the Demon Spirit Tomb gathered cultivators from the three prefectures and demon beasts also entered, fighting and killing occurred constantly in the battle for the Gengjin Tiger King's treasures, and the degree of bloodiness, at the time of its opening, had all players exclaiming about the thrill.

Of course, looking at this expansion pack, it seemed that the Demon Spirit Tomb had little to do with the Underworld Cultivators.

The turning point occurred within the Demon Spirit Tomb itself.

When the first group of cultivators was still exploring the periphery of the tomb searching for secrets, a group of mysterious cultivators suddenly burst out from the depths of the tomb with the Gengjin Tiger King's corpse, escaping from the encirclement of the crowd and vanishing into the distance.

Latter, the identities of these mysterious cultivators were verified.

They were indeed Underworld Cultivators.

...

As the first major open-instance dungeon in the Nine Heavens, the Demon Spirit Tomb garnered immense popularity, and Lu Qingshan also kept a close eye on its news. Your adventure continues at empire

So when some enthusiastic players uploaded videos of this plot to the forums, Lu Qingshan joined in on the excitement to watch, which left a deep impression on him.

Although it was not directly stated in the plot that there was a connection between the Underworld and the Demon Spirit Palace, Lu Qingshan had noticed an important point.

Why were Underworld Cultivators able to penetrate the core of the tomb when other cultivators were still getting familiar with the environment inside?

Was it because the Underworld Cultivators possessed extraordinary strength?

Clearly, that was unlikely; even if there was a gap, it could not be so vast.

The most likely possibility was that the so-called first batch of cultivators entering the Demon Spirit Tomb were not truly the first.

Possibly, several days earlier, the Underworld Cultivators had already entered the Demon Spirit Tomb.

Considering that the Demon Spirit Tomb was the Demon Spirit Palace's most closely guarded secret, the likelihood of the Underworld bypassing the Demon Spirit Palace to enter first was slim.

That the Demon Spirit Palace might have privately collaborated with the Underworld thus became an obvious conclusion.

This coupled with the sudden rise of the Underworld over the last hundred years, pressuring Lingxu Tower to the point of no recovery.

And coincidentally, it was during these hundred years that the Demon Spirit Palace discovered the Demon Spirit Tomb, which previously had no clues to its location.

Without claiming complete certainty, the possibility that the Demon Spirit Palace and the Underworld had long been in cahoots was undoubtedly very high.