A Farmer's Journey To Immortality

Staying in the Dadangar Subcontinent all this time, Aksai had truly exhausted his means of upgrading his external strength.

He had taken almost all of his acquired techniques to their peaks within his current cultivation base, but every technique came with an upper limit.

Unfortunately, the techniques he had acquired so far had either reached that limit or were not far from reaching it.

Although the puppets’ ranks had been increased and they could be used to deal with native 3rd Order cultivators to some extent, they were still of little use against the imperial cultivators.

However, there was still one frightening aspect of the Devil’s Den formation that Aksai had never used in the past because he feared the possibility of being apprehended by Spirit cultivators stronger than himself. This was the only path that remained largely unexplored by Aksai.

And that was the ability to drive trapped targets within the Devil’s Den into madness and turn them into mindless devils by using their accumulated negative emotions as fuel. This was different from turning them into woodland zombies, which was something the corrupted druid had done.

One had to know that Aksai was wary of Intent-based techniques because they were not used in the subcontinent where he resided. They were very potent, and even one misstep in their execution could endanger his own mental and physical safety, along with that of the enemies he used them against.

Aksai wasn’t aware that cultivators from the empire and the Eternal Sea freely used Intent-based techniques because they had access to various complete Intent-based inheritances. Unlike Aksai, these cultivators knew how to avoid the potential pitfalls of using such techniques.

Furthermore, most of the techniques mentioned in the original Devil’s Den Formation that Aksai knew of required the user to possess the bloodline of a corrupted druid.

Without the corrupted druid’s bloodline acting as the foundation, Aksai couldn’t properly activate them. But that didn’t mean the negative emotions were useless.

Aksai had spent years studying and accumulating them. And thankfully, with Nuri’s analytical capabilities, he had discovered another possibility.

He didn’t need to weaponize the negative emotions directly. He only needed to influence the minds of those trapped inside the formation.

A faint smile appeared on Aksai’s face.

’Fortunately, manipulating emotions doesn’t require me to become a corrupted druid. Even my self-modified druidic bloodline gives me the innate ability to do so.’

His figure silently emerged from the fog.

Aksai didn’t approach either woman directly. Instead, he stopped precisely between their two isolation layers.

From his position, the two women were separated by only a few hundred meters. Yet neither could perceive him.

Aksai raised his hand, and the surrounding fog slowly churned. Deep within the formation, the Demon Tree trembled. Even though the tree had used the negative emotions to refine its bloodline as well as Aksai’s bloodline, it had amassed an unimaginable amount of negative emotions within itself.

Spending them in such a way on two female cultivators was akin to drawing a drop or two of water from a near-endless sea.

In fact, inside the Devil’s Den, these exchanges of emotions could reach an equilibrium where the amount of spent negative emotions could equal the amount of newly accumulated negative emotions within the formation, creating a near-perpetual cycle until the targets’ souls were completely exhausted.

After all, negative emotions, once they reached a certain level of potency, had a tendency to brew more of their kind as time passed, dragging the affected person into a downward spiral until they hit rock bottom.

But with Aksai’s current mastery of harnessing negative emotions, forming such a cycle through his own influence was beyond his abilities. At the most, he could only enhance the negative emotions that were already present within the targets’ minds.

As such, he would be satisfied as long as the release of negative emotions within the isolated layers affected the two female cultivators long enough to lower their battle potential to its minimum.

To be honest, using negative emotions merely to affect the minds of targets trapped within the Devil’s Den was such a crude way of harnessing their power. It did not bring Aksai any benefit in terms of his cultivation level.

In a way, he was squandering precious cultivation resources to suppress two female cultivators. It was like using a hammer to strike at a group of ants.

But since Aksai had decided to do it, he didn’t think twice and simply began to act upon his plan.

At first, invisible strands of negative emotion flowed through the formation like countless thin threads. Aksai then took active control of their release and used the Demon Vines as a medium to release the negative emotions in the form of a peculiar Intent-based energy inside the isolated barriers of the two female cultivators.

Fear.

Frustration.

Anger.

Perhaps these imperial cultivators were themselves users of Intent-based techniques. The potency of the emotions gathered from the two female cultivators was already substantial. It also made them more prone to the negative emotions prevailing inside the Devil’s Den.

The duration of their entrapment also played a part. After all, they had spent quite some time trapped inside the formation, which had already started to affect their minds. As such, the effect of the invisible fog of negative emotions was even more pronounced.

Every destroyed Demon Vine increased their irritation.

Every failed attempt to break through the barrier increased their frustration.

And every moment spent alone increased their uncertainty.

Aksai quietly watched the two women after he released the essence of the negative emotions.

His method of releasing them inside the two isolated layers was quite simple. He simply injected the essence into the Demon Vines.

Every time the two female cultivators cut down an incoming Demon Vine, the vines released an invisible cloud of this essence, which directly affected their souls in a slow and consistent manner without their notice.

Saelyr was becoming increasingly aggressive.

Neshara, on the other hand, had become quieter. However, she, too, was affected by the invisible fog. It was just that she prevented herself from expressing her current state outwardly.