My Scales Can Make Equivalent Exchange
Chapter 274: Demon Bone Painted Skin

Chapter 274: Chapter 274: Demon Bone Painted Skin

After completing these tasks, Wang Zijia finally turned his attention to the last silver balance weight.

Weights: Monster God Chapter·Demonic Bone Skin-Painting Art

Level: Second-Grade High-Level Technique

Value: 500

Effect: Take the skin of demonic beasts, apply the art of painted skin, refine it into leather instrument, cover it on a person’s body, and obtain a certain amount of power.

Introduction: It was originally a part of a fourth-grade inheritance. Due to the death of a spiritual being, it split and only this technique was left behind. This technique can be supplemented with special methods to skin demonic beings. If worn by a spiritual root, the wearer can have the demonic being’s power and even gain wisdom for a short period.

However, as the painted skin is worn for a long term, it will gradually erode the spiritual root. The higher the cultivation, the longer it can be maintained. However, once the skin is planted, the final outcome is already destined.

After the wearer goes completely mad, the technique can be used to absorb all their essence into the painted skin, nurturing it. This is regarded as skin nurturing. Theoretically, if the painted skin is well-nurtured, it is equivalent to a road to heaven. It remains to be seen whether the refined skin can immortalize as a painted skin demon.

In addition, once this skin is refined to a certain level, it would be equivalent to an inheritance magical tool. The primary user of the skin can automatically comprehend this technique for alternate inheritance, or even pass it on to the next generation.

Seeing this technique, Wang Zijia was dumbstruck.

The Demonic Bone Skin-Painting Art?

Was this the reason why these demonic beings maintained their sanity?

So, are those people outside who have been frozen without skin all nurturing objects of the demonic beings’ painted skin?

With this technique, Wang Zijia knew what the Fox Taoist Ye Cheng’an had been up to these years.

He created a few demonic beings. After skinning and refining them, he found people to wear them and let them go out to pollute more people while nurturing the skins.

In this process, the newly born demonic beings were made into painted skins by him. Then, he let spiritual roots who don’t cultivate wear them to nurture the skin.

A little bit of spreading, and the result was thirty years of chaos in Tianhong!

A single Demon Dao caused such a large disaster, and the Cultivation World really was a world where the weak were prey to the strong!!!

······

It took Wang Zijia a long while to sort out his loot.

When he came to his senses, he realized the pitch-black scroll in front of him had completely shattered. He only held a palm-sized piece of special leather that looked like human skin in his hand. The mystery of the leather had disappeared, and it was just like ordinary leather.

After studying it for a while and not figuring out what the skin belonged to, Wang Zijia could only put it away.

Then he turned his attention to the ice sculptures all over the mountain. Each skinless blood human ice sculpture sparkled in the sunlight, many were still alive but barely had any energy left.

Most of them were only in their teens, and some were children aged seven or eight. Without exception, all of them were spiritual roots. Their fate should’ve been better than that of average people, and they should’ve become celestial beings admired by all beings.

Yet, as a result of their origins and luck, they ended up being used to nurture skins and endured the pain of being skinned twice. At this moment, they seemed to have been abandoned by destiny, waiting for the arrival of death.

"Sigh!"

Wang Zijia let out a sigh and did not immediately deal with them, but instead turned around and floated towards the back mountain.

The Back Mountain had been abandoned for many years, filled with weeds and shrubs, with few tomb entrances still visible. But at this moment the ground in all directions had been unearthed, as numerous skinned demons burrowed up, leaving behind a large landscape of holes, akin to the site of a severe rodent infestation.

Arriving before one of the holes, Wang Zijia’s blood-red broken armor emerged in pieces from his body. An ethereal energy shield also lit up around him. After swallowing another second-grade Replenishing Qi Pill, Wang Zijia floated downward from the entrance of the cave.

Whether Fox Taoist, Ye Cheng’an, had the same personality as Wang Zijia, or was inspired by Lady Hu’s Relics, it was evident he too was digging downwards. His dig was quite deep.

Coming across two people of the same cultivation readiness making underground palaces in a short span of time, Wang Zijia was a bit scared. Was it popular among cultivators to dig holes?

If it was, would he one day dig right into someone else’s house while he was digging?

These chaotic thoughts clouded his mind as he floated downwards, and after a while, he finally arrived at his destination.

The first thing he saw was a vast underground space, akin to a subterranean cavern. The dome-shaped ceiling was like an inverted bowl. Below it was a gigantic grid. Looking down from the sky, you could see numerous small compartments, like a prison.

If he hadn’t guessed wrong, many of the previously nurtured skin demons used to live here, suffering day and night under the erosion of the demon skin on their bodies, until they finally underwent a complete demonic transformation, turning into nutrients for a full-bodied demon skin.

In one corner of the dome, there was a huge passageway. Wang Zijia floated over and saw a series of underground buildings, akin to a small-scale subterranean city.

The conditions here were obviously much better. These were likely individuals with some potential, whom the Fox Taoist was particularly nurturing. However, as the nurtured skin demons, their ultimate fate was the same, though those with potential could probably nurture better skin or allow the skin to progress to the next stage, hence the upgraded treatment.

For example, the six sacrificial wine ceremony demon men beside Fox Taoist.

Most of these skin demons were ordinary people with spiritual roots in their previous lives. Once they put on the demonic skin and became nurturers, it became even harder to lead their own lives. Thus, there weren’t many things that cultivators could use, and their circumstances didn’t differ much from when they were ordinary individuals.

As such, after Wang Zijia wandered around for most of the circle, apart from some mundane objects, there were no major gains.

Eventually, Wang Zijia arrived at the innermost part of the building and saw a familiar temple.

It couldn’t compare to the underground palace he had seen before. There was only one room here, but the replica was fairly similar, including the plaque reading "Lady Hu," and the couplet-like lines on the columns outside the door.

Bones made of demon, ink dots red makeup, painting a life of different paths;

Flesh and skin cloak form, heaven and earth act as six matchmakers, seeking a lifetime of fate.

When he saw this in the palace before, he didn’t feel much, thinking it was a bit out of place with the temple. But having experienced the battle with Fox Taoist, Ye Cheng’an, and some other gains, Wang Zijia, upon seeing these two lines, seemed to have understood something.

In fact, his thoughts diverged, and he almost automatically filled in a great deal of the story.

Just as he connected all these pieces of information, Wang Zijia became dumbstruck. He took out a book from the stories he had acquired earlier: "Taoist God Commandments Chronicle," and turned to the Chapter on the spirit fox’s tale within the section about various spirits and monsters.

This was a very cliché, ghost-story-style narrative, which roughly went as follows:

In the ancient Tushan, there was a fox lady who fell in love with a human scholar. She sneaked out of the mountaintop to be with him, and they initially lived happily together.

But when the demon Dao learned of this, he tricked her husband into feeding her cinnabar talisman wine, killed the fox, and skinned her to make a fox fur coat.

Upon waking, the grief-stricken husband, having learned the truth, sought immortals for Daoist teachings, and managed to kill the demon Dao and retrieve his wife’s fox skin.

Later on, using the sealing method of the Taoist School, he made the fox skin the foundation and sealed it as a monster god. He became a temple priest himself and spent the rest of his life accompanying her, blessing all under their protection.

Previously thinking it a cliché, Wang Zijia had only briefly glanced at it. Now, upon looking at the sentences on the temple door pillar and taking into account the various actions of the Fox Taoist, Wang Zijia felt that Lady Hu’s temple and the spirit fox story were somehow connected.