Since she had decided to play the role of an ambush predator, Su Min quickly formulated a simple, effective plan.
First, she needed to blend in seamlessly with the sacrificial offerings and wait patiently for either the Mountain God himself or one of his envoys to appear before making her move.
As for the other cultivators infesting this world, she could not care less about their fates.
Killing them all might seem excessive, but she knew that sparing even one in a hundred would mean letting ninety nine percent of the worst scum escape justice. These people were even more depraved than the Fallen she had heard of. At least the Fallen, once they regained their peak strength, would stop their endless devouring and focus on proper cultivation. But these creatures, their very path to power required endless, senseless slaughter.
No wonder Yao Xian'er had chosen to hide in a remote, concealed cave to recover rather than trying to establish a faction or recruit local allies. These people were not worth saving. Burying them all was the only real solution. But their numbers were truly staggering. Su Min could not possibly hunt them down one by one. Along her journey here, she had already casually erased dozens of Golden Core and Nascent Soul stage cultivators she had sensed committing atrocities.
Those below that level were not even worth her time. There were simply too many, and some of them went from being ordinary humans to the Foundation Establishment stage in under a year.
A speed that was utterly unheard of, even in her own prestigious sect back home.
At this point, she could only sigh in weary frustration.
"I am tired. Just burn it all down."
…Well, not literally. She was not actually going to set the continent on fire.
Her real, primary targets were the Seven Dark Kings, all of them Mahayana stage experts.
Thanks to this world's brutal, dog eat dog nature, they were scattered far apart with no alliances or trust between them, giving her the perfect chance to pick them off one by one. But she knew she could not go too hard or too fast, or she might spook them into banding together against a common enemy, a fight she could not possibly win alone.
"According to Yao Xian'er, we cannot let their numbers exceed ten. Time to start culling," she reminded herself.
Though she spoke boldly, Su Min had no issue playing it safe and being patient. With her Unity Stage cultivation and array of treasures, infiltrating this sacrificial procession was child's play.
Soon, the day of the Mountain God Festival began.
Dozens of children, selected for the soul fragments festering within them, were carried out of the city gates under their families' numb, resigned gazes.
There were no tears. No heartfelt goodbyes. Just a chilling, habitual indifference.
The reason for this was simple, the soul fragment corruption.
These tainted fragments randomly attached themselves to developing fetuses, merging with their nascent souls at birth. But unlike Jiang Xi's unique case, where a single, powerful dark memory fragment had driven a Mahayana peak expert to madness, these were ordinary children with fragile, undeveloped souls.
Once the fragments awakened, the children, regardless of their original nature, would inevitably turn bloodthirsty and savage. If two such children met, they would instinctively fight to the death, devouring each other to strengthen their own fragment.
The aftermath of such awakenings often meant entire villages slaughtered overnight.
So in this world, so called immortals were a taboo, a curse. If a child showed the slightest signs of awakening, their own neighbors would often band together and beat them to death preemptively.
The Mountain God's demanded offerings were precisely these cursed children. Though their families were naturally reluctant, the alternative, watching their own child turn into a monster that would kill them, was far worse. Thus, the procession proceeded with a grim efficiency, without the dramatics or struggles Su Min might have expected. No wailing, no desperate pleas, just a hollow, grim acceptance.
Even the children themselves, after being given a final, hearty meal, followed the solemn adults cheerfully, largely oblivious to the grim fate that awaited them.
"This continent is sick to its very core," Su Min observed, her voice low.
"It shares the same foundational rules as the Heavenly Continent, yet because it was birthed in and saturated by this darkness, it has become… this."
If she ever reached the vaunted Great Emperor stage, no, she realized, even that might not be enough to fix this. Only a true Immortal would likely have the power to uproot this cursed land entirely. Yao Xian'er, in her prime, had only managed to tear off a fragment and toss it into the void, an act that, while causing untold suffering within that fragment, had prevented a far greater calamity from spilling into the main universe.
Under Su Min's watchful gaze, the procession finally arrived at the foot of the Fulu Mountain Range, one of the dark continent's most massive landforms. Towering peaks, each over one hundred thousand meters high, stretched farther than the eye could see, a sight impossible on any normal planet due to gravitational and structural limits.
But what immediately caught Su Min's attention was the mountains themselves.
They were barren, lifeless, yet they seemed to be… pulsating with a slow, rhythmic energy.
"Strange. Are these mountains… alive? Did that bastard fuse his consciousness with the entire mountain range?"
If that was the case, killing him would be a logistical nightmare.
While she was confident she could shatter planets with her full power, the Dark Continent's structure was far sturdier, reinforced by dense spiritual energy and dark corruption. And this specific mountain range was larger than most celestial bodies.
Destroying it outright would require activating her Emperor artifact at full power, a move that would drain her severely and leave her vulnerable afterward, a risk she could not afford.
"I need to find his true body, the core of his consciousness," she decided.
Just as she was pondering her next move, the ritual began.
Before a sheer cliff face thousands of meters tall, the appointed priests lit pungent incense and began to chant in a low, monotone drone.
"O Mountain God, grant us favorable winds and rains!"
In response, a gigantic, rough hewn face emerged from the solid stone, its features indistinct but its mouth yawning open like a cave entrance.
"An avatar. Not the real thing," Su Min noted, her eyes gleaming with focus.
This was just a transport mechanism, a way for the Mountain God to automate the child collection process across his vast territory without ever revealing his true location.
"Perfect."
This very laziness and caution was her opportunity.
As the children, guided by an unseen force, began to float one by one into the gaping maw, Su Min slipped in unnoticed among them, using her Illusion Ring to perfectly take the form of a small, unassuming seven year old child.
"Let us see where you are hiding," she thought, a hunter's focus settling over her.
Space twisted and distorted around her as the stone avatar activated its teleportation function. A Mahayana expert's control over space far surpassed her own, a gap that only reaching Mahayana herself could bridge. But with an Emperor artifact as her ultimate trump card, she was not particularly worried. As they traveled deeper through the warped space, the increasingly dense, malevolent spiritual energy in the tunnel began violently awakening the slumbering soul fragments inside the other children.
"M, mommy…?"
One by one, the children woke up, their eyes glazing over with a foreign consciousness, and hell immediately broke loose. The first child to fully awaken let out a guttural snarl and pounced on the nearest one, biting down on their throat with terrifying, inhuman force.
Crack.
The sickening sound of crushing bone echoed in the stone passage as the victim thrashed silently, their trachea completely severed.
It was a brutal, efficient frenzy. Within minutes, half the children were dead, their blood staining the stone floor.
The survivors, however, saw their cultivation levels skyrocket as they absorbed the power of the slain.
"Already at the Body Refining Stage?!" Su Min watched, genuinely stunned, as the children biologically evolved through slaughter. Back in her sect, reaching the Qi Refining stage from scratch typically took a talented disciple a full decade of dedicated work. These kids were on track to hit it in a single day. By the time only three children remained in this particular group, all had reached the late Body Refining Stage, their eyes glowing with pure bloodlust as they sized each other up for the final fight.
Su Min, having rendered herself completely invisible and intangible to their senses, could only shake her head in disgust.
"He is farming them. Each sacrificial mouth is an isolated arena. He lets them kill each other until only the strongest one remains, and then… he dines on the winner."
It was a disgusting, abhorrent process. But it was undeniably efficient.
By the time of the next spatial merge, the last child standing from the first group was already at the Qi Refining Stage, having devoured all his competitors. The spaces merged again, pitting multiple Qi Refining children against each other in a larger arena. Su Min calculated that the final survivor of this round would likely reach Foundation Establishment in just three days.
It was a speed that would put even the most celebrated geniuses of the Heavenly Continent to shame, a testament to the horrifying efficiency of this dark, cannibalistic path.