Inner Demons

This King Ao, surrounded by a group of Demon Generals, ascended from the dark depths of the valley to the bottom of the lake. Exiting the gorge through the mountain passes on both sides, he saw a naked, fiery-red demoness swimming restlessly in the water. She wore no clothes, but her body was covered in countless hard, steel-like scales. Each scale was a brilliant red, glowing faintly in the dim, lightless depths of the water.

When King Ao came out of the valley and saw her, he roared, "You brazen Red Serpent King! I sent one of my vanguard to deliver a message, and you bit off one of his pincers. Why have you come to my Wind and Wave Valley now? Are you here to bully me?"

The Red Serpent King, though she had the form of a human, was in her demonic body, and her appearance was far from pleasant. Her face was ferocious with a few bony spines, and the faint red light from her body made her look terrifying and strange. She first revealed a dreadful smile and then said, "What are you talking about, King Ao? That Demon General of yours lost a pincer, but it'll grow back in a few days. It's not a big deal. But as for my Coiling Immortal Valley..."

She wasn't afraid of King Ao hitting her with his golden mace. Instead, she swam gracefully toward him with her gruesome smile. "Something terrible has happened in my Coiling Immortal Valley and the Cauldron Forging Valley! That Vicious Worm somehow came here, ignoring the big fish and specifically preying on the small demons. It first wrecked that Old Wang Ba's cave and then came to my cave. It looks like it's headed for your Wind and Wave Valley now. So I thought, 'Oh, King Ao was so right before—we should join forces to subdue that Vicious Worm!'"

King Ao sneered when he heard her. "If you had known this would happen, why did you act the way you did then!"

The Serpent King gave him a bizarre smile. "I know you're worried about the aquatic creatures in our Dongting, King Ao, and that's why you want us to work together. But you've forgotten one thing—whose side is that Old Wang Ba's little daughter on?"

The resourceful King Ao was stunned for a long time, pondering the deeper meaning of her words. But he couldn't figure it out. He simply changed his expression, said no more, and feigned a look of knowing it all. "Oh... so what?"

The Serpent King's eyes widened in surprise. "King Ao, think about it! All six of us demon kings in the valley know about this—this Vicious Worm is supposed to be killed and given to the Golden-Winged Great Peng King to eat! Every year, who comes to collect the worm's meat? It's the Peng King's adopted daughter, Bai Yunxin! Do you remember, King Ao? A hundred years ago, when Bai Yunxin was at the lake, Old Wang Ba's daughter happened to be out playing. Bai Yunxin saw her, said she looked cute, picked her up, and took her away to be her maidservant. She's been extremely fond of her for the last hundred years!"

"Why didn't I want to get involved before?" The demoness stared at King Ao with her yellowish eyes, and then she moved closer, whispering near his ear. "Because even if the five of us drained our resources to kill the Vicious Worm, when Bai Yunxin comes to get the meat, Old Wang Ba's daughter can say a few good words about him in front of her. Those few words are worth a thousand of ours, and all the credit will go to him! King Ao, don't you think I'm right?"

The Serpent King didn't care about his reaction. She continued to whisper in his ear. "I didn't want to do all that work for nothing before. But now that the Vicious Worm has even destroyed my Coiling Immortal Valley, how can I, the Red Serpent King, swallow this humiliation? It's also a great opportunity—that Old Wang Ba has nowhere to go and can't possibly swallow this, either. So now, we can make this work. I say, we can lure the Vicious Worm... toward that Li Shan! Didn't he say he has a powerful backer and is coming to stir up trouble for us?"

"We can set up a trap and a diversion to lure the Vicious Worm, Li Shan, and his backer to fight each other. If that person kills the Vicious Flood Dragon, that's perfect. We can have Old Wang Ba tell his daughter that the person killed the Vicious Worm, and the meat has rotted, so there's no way to deliver it—Bai Yunxin will go crazy when she hears that! As a powerful True Realm demoness, she might find a way to enter this restriction and teach that person a lesson!"

"What if that person can't kill the Vicious Worm? We can still have Old Wang Ba tell his daughter that the person wants to steal food from the Peng King—to covet the Vicious Worm's muscles, bones, and fur. Bai Yunxin would get furious and would have to teach that guy a lesson. King Ao, don't you think my plan is brilliant?"

After hearing the Serpent King's plan, King Ao praised her to the heavens in his heart. However, he remained composed on the surface, just nodding slightly. "Hmm, this requires careful consideration... Serpent King, please, come with me!"

The two demon kings talked for a while, while the demon soldiers next to King Ao were completely confused. The Demon General who had lost his pincers thought his great king would avenge him, but he just went back to the cave with them in a daze, completely unaware of what had happened or how they had become "friends."

And at this moment, Li Yunxin and Li Shan were also in the hundreds of meters deep Dongting, listening to a small half-man, half-fish demon talking about the movements of the five valley masters. The little demon didn't speak clearly, but Li Yunxin understood everything he wanted to know from the few words.

After the little demon finished, Li Shan quickly came up to him with a smile and said, "You see, I've sent spies into the caves of all four of those demon kings—they'd never suspect that. In this whole Dongting, the only one who isn't so stupid is the Frog King. But the Frog King isn't the type to cause trouble, so I don't pay much attention to him. As the saying goes, know yourself and your enemy, and you will never be defeated..."

He was chattering on, trying to take credit, but Li Yunxin wasn't very interested in what he was saying.

The demons in this Dongting were too weak to warrant his attention. The only reason he was staying here and listening to their ridiculous "tricks" was because of one thing—the little maidservant by Bai Yunxin's side was... the daughter of Old Wang Ba in this lake's Cauldron Forging Valley?

When he first saw that little maidservant, he thought she looked pretty and had a lively, playful personality. When she wasn't showing her cruel demonic side, she was a rather likable little creature, but he didn't expect to find out her background here.

But it wasn't really about being curious about the maidservant; it was about being curious about Bai Yunxin.

He didn't know how deep Bai Yunxin's connection to this Dongting was, just as he never knew that she had some connection with the Ghost Emperor in Weicheng...

But...

These were not what he cared about the most. The reason he was thinking about these things was that he couldn't think about the things he truly wanted to contemplate.

For example, what was the situation outside the Dongting's restriction?

Was it true that cultivators were gathering in Weicheng, planning a decisive battle with the demons? What were the demons thinking?

...The Black and White Yama Kings hadn't come to him in a long time, and he felt that this was abnormal.

Since the five demon kings in the lake wanted to cause trouble, he would let them for a bit and lure out the Vicious Flood Dragon. He had originally planned to just kill it recklessly, but now he realized that going along with the demon kings' plan seemed to be more effective.

He wanted to sort out this Dongting as soon as possible, and then focus on thinking about the world outside the lake, his own situation, and that Master Su.

"Just watch for now," Li Yunxin sighed softly in the water.

At this very moment, two thousand miles away in Jinghua, the capital of Qing Kingdom, someone said the same thing.

The person was behind a yellowish-green silk curtain, on a magnificent gilded bed. She waved her hand as she spoke. Her fingers looked snow-white and slender, and each of her fingernails was like white jade.

The silver-armored warrior who was standing in front of her curtain immediately stepped back and bowed his head, hearing the rustling of the woman's clothes from behind the curtain.

She must have been lying down, leaning on an ice pillow.

The curtain, and the large bed under it, were not in a room, or even in a pavilion. They were on a lush green lawn. The lawn was vast, with only faint shadows of woods in the far distance, as large as a hunting ground.

The woods to the east were the Meeting Dragon Avenue—a straight road that ran north and south through Jinghua, leading directly to Yongding Gate.

Behind Yongding Gate was the Jade Steps Plaza, behind Jade Steps Plaza was Jinghua Gate, and behind Jinghua Gate... was the emperor's residence.

This meant that the woman behind the curtain was in Jinghua, the capital of Qing Kingdom, in the most bustling part of the city—a place of honor that the silver-armored warrior could not have imagined.

Then, the warrior heard the woman behind the curtain say another sentence.

"Tell the emperor to come this afternoon. I have something to ask him."

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