"Good lad, you've caught up with me! Congratulations! You have the potential to live a long and prosperous life, and even become an immortal!"
Yan Chixia, who was protecting him, stared wide-eyed in disbelief.
Xiao Ning turned around and solemnly bowed.
"Many thanks to Brother Yan for the gift of the thousand-year-old wood heartwood and for your kindness in protecting the Dharma!"
Yan Chixia shook his head and said, "I am unworthy of such praise. This is all your own good fortune, young man Xiao. How could I dare to take credit for it?"
"I will never thank you enough; I will always remember your kindness and never forget it!"
Xiao Ning remained steadfast in her opinion, feeling deeply grateful to him.
He then looked around but couldn't find the scholar Ning Caichen. After calculating with his fingers, he realized that three days had already passed.
He then asked, "Brother Yan, where is that bookworm?"
"...So I just fired them!"
Yan Chixia recounted what had happened.
Xiao Ning nodded and said no more. After all, he had now recovered most of his cultivation, so a mere female ghost was no longer important.
"Brother Yan, Nie Xiaoqian and that scholar are gone, but the tree demon's lair still has many female ghosts. Why don't we sweep it up and eliminate evil completely!"
Faced with Xiao Ning's suggestion, Yan Chixia shook his head.
"No, those female ghosts aren't stupid. They've mostly escaped, so there's no point in going back. I won't participate!"
"I feel I've gained some insights from the battle with the tree demon, and my cultivation may have improved a bit. Otherwise, you go ahead, and I'll go back and meditate for a while!"
Yan Chixia spoke frankly and stated his purpose.
Upon hearing this, Xiao Ning's face lit up with joy, and he asked, "Oh? This is a good thing. Do you need me to protect you?"
Yan Chixia shook his head and refused, saying, "No need. I'm not in seclusion, just meditating for two days. You may go now!"
Xiao Ning thought for a moment, then nodded and replied, "Very well, then I wish Brother Yan continued success in his cultivation and a steady rise in rank!"
"Alright, go ahead!"
"Farewell!"
After exchanging pleasantries, Xiao Ning took to the air and flew towards the forest behind Lanruo Temple. At the same time, his spiritual sense pierced through his body, scanning inch by inch, searching for the tree demon's lair.
Like a headless fly, Xiao Ning wandered around the vast forest for a long time before finally discovering an unusual place.
This was a valley, lush with vegetation, and looked quite ordinary, but the soaring Yin energy in the valley could not escape Xiao Ning's notice.
"Found it..."
Xiao Ning descended from mid-air and stared at a cliff face in the valley, which looked like ordinary soil and had no presence at all.
"Ha, what a clumsy sleight of hand!"
With a wave of his hand, a surge of magical power erupted, causing the cliff in front of him to tremble like ripples on water. The scenery before him suddenly changed, no longer soil, but a passageway more than five meters wide and three meters high.
Xiao Ning stepped into the passageway. He didn't feel crowded at all. He could hear the "crackling" sound under his feet from time to time. These were the corpses that had not yet completely decomposed. On both sides, he could occasionally see the eerie green phosphorescence, like a ghostly underworld.
In just a few miles, he saw no fewer than a thousand corpses, and that was only what he could see with the naked eye; he didn't know how many more had decomposed or were buried in the ground.
The further you go, the denser the torches become on both sides of the wall, and the stench in the air gradually disappears, replaced by an increasingly strong smell of blood. The ground under your feet is soft and wet, and when you step on it, it feels like you're going to sink in.
After walking for a while, and turning a corner of more than ninety degrees, the view suddenly opened up before us, revealing a huge cave.
Unlike the darkness outside, the stone walls inside are inlaid with many luminous pearls, emitting a soft light that illuminates the entire cave.
At the very back of the cave was a stone bed, with a human skin curtain hanging on it reflecting a faint green light, and the area beneath the bed was in disarray.
It turns out that there were many urns containing the ashes of female ghosts placed under the bed, and the tree demon used these urns to control the female ghosts.
However, now that the tree spirit is dead, many female ghosts have snatched their own urns and scattered.
On a table not far away sat a wine glass filled with bright red blood, and an oil lamp made from a human skull, the human oil burning and emitting a strange smell.
There was also a copy of the Diamond Sutra lying face down next to it, clearly indicating that the tree demon was drinking human blood and reciting Buddhist scriptures before it died.
This scene was truly bizarre to the extreme.
"This tree demon has truly unique taste. I wonder what the Buddha would think if he knew he had such a follower!"
Xiao Ning casually picked up the Buddhist scripture, flipped through it a couple of times, and then tossed it aside. It was just an ordinary Buddhist scripture, not a treasure.
He wandered around the cave at will, occasionally rummaging through things.
The cave dwelling is filled with all kinds of Buddhist scriptures, including the Diamond Sutra, the Tripitaka, the Guanyin Sutra, and so on. It could practically be a Buddhist expo.
"Poor bastard..."
Besides the Buddhist scriptures, Xiao Ning also discovered a relic, but it was covered with cracks, its Buddhist light was dim, and its spiritual energy was almost invisible, clearly indicating that it had been completely absorbed by the tree demon.
"Huh, a diary?"
Suddenly, Xiao Ning's gaze was drawn to a booklet. Upon opening it, he realized that it was actually a diary written by a tree spirit.
Before its decline, Lanruo Temple was one of the most prestigious Buddhist temples in Zhejiang Province, boasting numerous eminent monks and containing relics in its thousands of stupas, which shone with golden light day and night.
The tree spirit's true form was a thousand-year-old locust tree in front of the Sutra Repository on the back mountain of Lanruo Temple. It heard Buddhist teachings and was bathed in Buddhist light day and night, which is how it developed sentience.