Daily life of a cultivation judge-Chapter 1050: Spark of realization

Die? Die? Why the heck do I need to die? It's not like I had a choice about going to that place. That darn mountain kidnapped me and threw me in there!

Yang Qing immediately started panicking, cursing, and lamenting his dire situation. His fear made him forget that he was the one who had chosen to sneak a peek into the hut.

That curse wouldn't have touched him if he hadn't seen the figure there. But now, here he was.

Yang Qing's bitter gaze fell upon the scroll tubing in his hand. Perhaps because of the death threat, it felt heavier than it had at first. Or maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the rust stains on it now looked less like rust stains and more like blood stains.

The tubing seemed to warp in his grasp, an ominous cloud forming around it, twisting into the shape of a mouth that wore a sinister grin.

"You're next, little brat. I hope your blood tastes better than the last cultivator," the faceless mouth rasped, ending with a low, chilling laugh, taking great care to lick its lips as it did so.

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Yang Qing knew it was just a hallucination, but that didn't stop him from desperately wanting to throw the tubing as far away as possible. It felt more like the Grim Reaper's tracking tool than a simple scroll holder.

"Is there any way to remove this death sentence?" Yang Qing asked, his voice weak, his smile pitiful.

"Yes, there is. Just don't reveal what you saw, and you'll be okay..." Wei Shen replied simply.

Wei Shen's words did little to ease Yang Qing's growing worry, which was evident in the way he clutched and eyed the scroll tubing.

Though Yang Qing was usually a talkative person, the type who wouldn't stop talking if given the chance and had plenty to brag about and the perfect audience for it, he still knew where to draw the line when it came to what he could or couldn't share.

There was no need for Wei Shen to add the death threat. He could have simply told him to keep the things he had witnessed and experienced in that place to himself, and Yang Qing would have gladly complied.

But now, with death hanging over him like a dark cloud, all Yang Qing could think about was that he was a young man, one who hadn't lived much, with the specter of death looming over every moment. His life was already stressful enough, he didn't need more added to his plate.

Unable to suppress his frustration, he shot Wei Shen a resentful look for cursing him. Wei Shen, in turn, could only offer a helpless, apologetic smile. It was unavoidable. The figure in the hut was a secret that had to be guarded at all costs.

To Wei Shen, Yang Qing's encounter with that person was even more surprising than discovering that he had created a middle-tier blue-grade cultivation art. The hut was deeply secluded, and one could not simply stumble upon it by wandering aimlessly through the area, as Yang Qing had described earlier. The Dao laws present there were far more powerful than those experienced in this location, which concealed the hut's whereabouts. These laws often went unnoticed because it required someone at a certain level of understanding and cultivation to perceive them.

Yang Qing wasn't the first person to be transported to that place. As he mentioned earlier, the requirements were quite straightforward: anyone who created a middle-tier blue-grade art would be transported there. However, most of those who ended up in that location never even noticed the hut, despite the presence of many domain experts amongst them.

Few ever find it. During his time as a guard, Wei Shen had only seen about eight people make their way to that hut, and of those eight, four were hardly a surprise, considering their talent and the connections they had to the figure within the hut.

Yang Qing's unexpected encounter with it completely shocked him. He could not understand how he had even arrived there.

Wei Shen was snapped out of his thoughts by Yang Qing's next question, which, unsurprisingly, was about his imminent death.

"So who's going to kill me? The purple guards? Assassins from the Order? A curse? Please, don't let it be a curse... or is it this scroll?" Yang Qing asked, his eyes slowly widening in terror as they fixed on the scroll tubing, before drifting toward the scroll ends protruding all over Sage Mountain.

With trembling hands and a pale face, Yang Qing pointed toward one of the scroll ends, his voice faltering as he asked, "A...are... are they..." He paused, overwhelmed by the weight of the implication behind his guess. Yet, no matter how traumatizing the answer might be, he had to ask.

"Are t...those coffins for those who talked and died?" Yang Qing asked, staring intently at Wei Shen.

Wei Shen almost laughed at the question, but upon seeing Yang Qing's serious and visibly frightened expression, he quickly reconsidered.

"They're not coffins. They're just scrolls…"

"Scrolls that trap souls?" Yang Qing pressed, his voice trembling.

"No, just normal scrolls," Wei Shen replied, shaking his head.

"If they're so normal, then why are they in such a strange place? And why can't I pull them, no matter how much force I use? I even tried to infuse Dao into my pull, and it still didn't work. Clearly, they're not normal," Yang Qing said, pointing at one of the scrolls.

"Senior Wei Shen, you don't need to hold back. Despite my current demeanor, I assure you that I can handle the truth. Just be honest with me: those cultivators let something slip about that figure and paid the ultimate price with a curse that killed them instantly, didn't they? But the curse… it didn't stop there," Yang Qing murmured, his gaze becoming thoughtful and insightful, as if he had unraveled the entire mystery.

He approached the nearest scroll and crouched a few feet away.

"My guess is that after the curse kills them, it extracts their understanding—the fruits of their cultivation. All of it, the entire culmination of what they've learned in their journey, is transformed. They no longer exist as flesh and bones, but as scrolls. Right, Senior Wei Shen?" Yang Qing said, growing more confident in his theory, his gaze fixed on the scroll.

He didn't wait for Wei Shen to respond, continuing with his deduction. Standing up, he looked around with a deep, contemplative gaze.

"No wonder this place is so densely filled with different types of Daos. I always wondered how it achieved that. So, that's how..." Yang Qing muttered, his eyes lighting up with the spark of realization.

"Excluding its insidious origin, it's actually quite an ingenious approach," he added, cupping his chin in thought.