HPDBC Chapter 223 Famous Mountain Spiritual Veins Blockaded and Sealnped by Clan Powers and High-Ranking C
Chapter 223 Famous Mountain Spiritual Veins Blockaded and Sealnped by Clan Powers and High-Ranking C
It was the end of the third year of the Alliance Era, winter. Five o'clock in the morning.
The seventh satellite city of Suzhou, outside the north gate.
The sky remained pitch black, and a biting wind, mixed with turbulent spiritual energy, howled and raged outside the hundred-meter-high [Impregnable Fortress] light barrier on the city wall.
Old Ding, wrapped in a worn-out military green cotton overcoat, stood quietly in the assembly area outside the city gate. Last night, he had already delivered the "Lieyangdan waste liquid" home overnight and fed his wife a negligible drop.
Seeing his wife's originally bluish-purple face finally regain a trace of color, a color that suggested she was alive, under the impact of the raging fire poison, Old Ding knew that he had given his life for nothing.
"Gather up! Everyone, get yourselves together!"
A harsh shout shattered the deathly silence of the morning. The burly, bearded man from the recruitment office last night, dressed in light armor made of first-tier mutated wolf skin and carrying a machete that gleamed with spiritual light, strode over.
Behind him followed four other cultivators. Three of them, like the bearded man, were at the mid-stage of Qi Refining, while the tall, thin man in the middle, with a sinister expression, possessed extremely solid spiritual energy fluctuations, clearly indicating that he had reached the Great Perfection of Qi Refining!
"These are the ten 'porters' you found?"
A cultivator with a pointed mouth and monkey-like face glanced at Old Ding and the other ten mortals. When he saw Old Ding's mechanical prosthetic leg, he let out a sneer without any attempt to hide it. "How come you even attracted a cripple like this who's half-buried in the ground? This old thing's flesh is so tough, even a demon beast would find it hard to chew."
"You know nothing. This is a retired veteran. He knows the rules and how to die in a way that will attract the attention of beasts." The burly man with the thick beard sneered. "Stop talking nonsense. It's almost dawn. We need to sneak into the outer perimeter of the Jiuhua Mountain spiritual vein before the Alliance garrison changes shifts."
Old Ding and the other nine ordinary people whose lives had been bought with resettlement fees stood silently in the cold wind, and no one objected.
They had all received the money to buy their lives and signed waivers. In this group, they were no longer human beings, but disposable commodities that could be discarded at any time.
"Set off!"
With a wave of his hand from the tall, thin captain, the group of fifteen people officially stepped into the perilous wilderness.
……
After the Jianmu Divine Tree drained the pollution from the void, the wilderness no longer possessed deadly void radiation. Instead, it was replaced by an extremely harsh environment filled with violent and disordered spiritual energy and primordial miasma.
The trees here grow extremely tall and twisted under the influence of spiritual energy, their canopies completely blocking out the already weak sunlight.
"Crunch... crunch..."
Old Ding walked at the very back of the group, his old mechanical prosthetic leg struggling to trudge through the muddy ground covered with withered branches and leaves.
Ahead of him walked a boy who looked to be under twenty. The boy was thin and bony, carrying a huge, specially made metal basket for carrying ore on his back, which weighed him down so much that he could barely straighten his back. They had only walked a dozen miles since they set off, but the boy was already panting heavily and his face was pale.
Old Ding sighed and reached out to help the child carry the heavy metal basket.
"Thank you... thank you, Uncle." The child looked at Old Ding gratefully, his voice trembling. "My... my sister has blood deficiency and needs money to buy low-grade spiritual medicine... I heard that if we can make it back alive, we can get two hundred spirit crystal vouchers..."
Old Ding didn't say anything, but silently patted him on the shoulder.
Go back alive?
These ordinary mortals, driven to despair by despair, had no idea what they were about to face.
"The sealed-off area of the Jiuhua Mountain Spiritual Vein is just ahead. Everyone, shut your mouths and tread lightly!"
The tall, thin man at the forefront of the Qi Refining stage, who had reached the Great Perfection realm, suddenly stopped, lowered his voice, and became extremely solemn.
Old Ding peered ahead through the gaps in the dense foliage.
Just a few kilometers away, the famous Buddhist mountain that was extremely famous in the old days—Jiuhua Mountain—was now completely shrouded by an extremely large, semi-transparent golden barrier that soared into the sky!
The barrier exuded an extremely terrifying pressure, and even projected the giant emblem of the Earth Alliance military.
Inside the barrier, the main peak of Mount Jiuhua seemed to have been forcibly raised several thousand meters by some divine force. On the surface of the mountain, the originally ordinary rocks, nourished by the dense, almost liquefied spiritual energy, actually shimmered with a layer of crystal-clear spiritual light, like jade.
That was a truly complete spiritual vein, teeming with a vast amount of resources for cultivating immortality!
"Famous mountains and rivers have always been places where the spiritual energy of heaven and earth converges. After the catastrophe, the laws of heaven and earth were reshaped, and these famous mountains became even more auspicious places for nurturing spirit stone veins." Old Ding recalled the propaganda from the official news.
According to the Alliance's original laws, these spiritual veins nurtured by heaven and earth should be strategic resources shared by all mankind, to be mined by the Alliance in a unified manner to arm the front lines and defend against the void.
However, reality has taken an extremely distorted and unsolvable turn in this process.
The old-fashioned tycoons have indeed been swept into the dustbin of history. Compared to Kunlun and the 749 incident, those former financial giants are not even worth a dog.
However, the power vacuum was quickly filled by another group of people.
That is—the "New Era Cultivation Clan"!
They are an extremely large [psychic interest group] composed of high-ranking officials of the Alliance Council, high-ranking generals of the 749 Bureau who wield significant military power, and the secular relatives of Kunlun inner disciples.
Kunlun is high above, and the Dao Lord is an even more ethereal being. Kunlun only cares about the survival of humanity and the cultivation of top-tier combat power; it would never interfere with the specific mining and allocation of a mine in the mortal world.
This gave these "cultivation factions" an opportunity to exploit loopholes.
Under the guise of "alliance strategic security reserves," they legally mobilized the alliance's highest military force to imprison a portion of the revitalized famous mountains, rivers, and mineral veins!
"Inside the defensive line is a legal mining area, filled with the Alliance's most advanced psionic mining machines and powerful cultivators at the Foundation Establishment stage or above. As for us lower-level people, we're not even allowed to get close to the barrier to inhale a breath of the overflowing spiritual energy residue."
Old Ding looked at the golden chasm engraved with the Alliance emblem, his eyes filled with sorrow.
This is the most despairing form of class stratification. They weren't robbed of their resources by bandits, but rather completely isolated from the "path to upward mobility" by this massive, legal, and ruthless cultivation machine.
"Captain, do we really have to go in?"
The weasel-faced cultivator looked at the barrier around Mount Jiuhua, swallowed hard, and said with a hint of fear in his voice, "This is the directly controlled area of the Third War Zone of the Alliance, backed by the Wang family of the capital! I heard that there are heavily armed armored vehicles patrolling the outer perimeter, and there is even a late-stage Foundation Establishment warlord stationed inside. If we get caught, it's definitely a dead end."
"What's there to be afraid of! The bold will thrive, the timid will starve!"
The tall, thin captain, who was at the peak of the Qi Refining stage, gritted his teeth, his eyes flashing with a gambler's madness.
"Those powerful cultivation clans eat the meat, leaving not even a drop of soup for us rogue cultivators with no background! The Jiuhua Mountains stretch for hundreds of kilometers, and even if they were the regular army of the alliance, it would be impossible for them to be completely watertight."
"I spent a fortune to acquire inside information: a miniature spirit-gathering array node on the outskirts of the No. 3 abandoned mine area is aging, and every morning a gap appears in the barrier there, big enough for a person to squeeze through!"
"That area is an 'abandoned mine' that has already been mined by them using heavy machinery. Although there are no mid-grade or higher spirit stones inside, the remaining low-grade spirit stone fragments, if you can carry out a basketful, will be a fortune on the black market!"
"This is the only chance for us lowly rogue cultivators to get our hands on Foundation Establishment resources! If we pull off this heist and successfully establish our Foundation, we can escape our rogue cultivator status, get a position in the border guards, and never have to be oppressed by this class system like rats again!"
The captain's words instantly ignited the flames of greed and resentment in the eyes of the other cultivators.
In this era where the path to advancement has been completely blocked by high-level cultivators, the only way for ordinary people or low-level cultivators to climb up is... to risk their lives!
"Listen up, you old bastards."
The bearded man walked up to Old Ding and the other ten mortals, lowered his voice, and said in an extremely chilling tone, "Once you slip into the barrier's gap and trigger the alarm, or encounter the mutated guardian beasts on the outer perimeter, all ten of you run in the opposite direction! Anyone who hesitates will be chopped to pieces!"
"If you can lure the patrol or monsters away for ten minutes, giving us time to mine the ore and retreat, then you've completed your mission!"
The ten ordinary people fell silent, and the boy carrying the basket trembled with fear, biting his lip so hard that he dared not make a sound.
"Walk!"
Led by their captain, the Blood Wolf Expedition Team, under the cover of night and miasma, moved silently toward the edge of the Jiuhua Mountain barrier, like a group of desperate criminals infiltrating a dragon's den or a tiger's lair.
After half an hour.
They stopped below a very remote and steep rock face.
The area was overgrown with weeds. If the captain hadn't been using an extremely precise military-grade spiritual energy compass for positioning, it would have been impossible to discover that at the junction of the two massive rocks, the golden barrier that should have been indestructible actually had a spiritual energy fault that was barely perceptible to the naked eye.
It was like an extremely fine crack in bulletproof glass.
"This is it!" The captain exclaimed with delight. "The barrier has a self-repairing function. This gap can only last for five minutes at most. Everyone, quickly get inside!"
Old Ding took a deep breath and followed behind the boy, struggling to squeeze through the crack into the "Immortal Realm," which was considered the exclusive domain of the cultivation sects.
The moment you pass through the barrier, an extremely rich and pure spiritual energy, so intense it's almost intoxicating, rushes towards you like a tangible force!
Old Ding took just one breath and felt a refreshing coolness in his lungs, which were covered in hidden injuries from years of hard work. Even the inferior array embedded in his mechanical prosthetic leg instantly doubled in speed and stopped making that rough friction sound.
"No wonder...no wonder those powerful clans used the name of the alliance to tightly seal off the spiritual veins."
Old Ding was filled with extreme shock and sorrow. "If you cultivate in this kind of environment, why would you need to go through any life-or-death trials? Even a pig could live to be 150 years old if it soaked in this spiritual energy every day."
Just as this group of desperate outlaws from the bottom of society were immersed in the hard-won high concentration of spiritual energy...
"roar--!!!"
A terrifying roar, extremely violent and deafening, suddenly exploded from the depths of an abandoned mine not far in front of them!
Immediately afterwards, the earth began to tremble violently.
Accompanied by heavy footsteps, a terrifying behemoth, over five meters long, covered in extremely thick dark red rock armor, with eyes that gleamed with a bloodthirsty red light like searchlights, slowly emerged from the shadows of the abandoned mine.
That was an extremely powerful beast, which had even begun to master earth magic—a second-tier mutated rock-armored bear!
In the third year of the spiritual energy revival, although the number of first-tier demonic beasts in the wilderness began to increase, second-tier demonic beasts were extremely rare and overlord-level existences.
And around its neck was a [Beast Taming Collar] that flashed with the Alliance military's number!
This is a terrifying biological weapon that powerful clans deliberately keep on the outskirts of spiritual veins to replace human soldiers for low-cost patrols and to devour the flesh and blood of trespassers!
"Damn it! The intelligence was wrong! This abandoned mine not only has remnants of ore, but also a damn second-tier guardian beast!"
The captain's face turned deathly pale instantly. His Qi Refining Stage Perfection cultivation was no match for this terrifying second-tier demonic beast. Instead, he felt an extremely deadly pressure from his bloodline.
He abruptly turned his head, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Old Ding and the other ten mortals. He drew his longsword and roared hysterically like a gambler who had lost everything:
"Run! Get the hell out of here into the woods on the left! Lure this beast away!"