Chapter 3374
The million demons across from them were not an army, so Yu Lei had to roar for quite a while before most of them finally quieted down and followed his commands.
Xiao Heng and Li Zhaoyuan were also rather tense at this moment. Although the soldiers were inside the defensive formation, an attack on the souls on such a massive scale would certainly inflict heavy losses on the army.
Ye Liuyun, however, did not order them to retreat. Instead, he told them to hold their ground. Only the puppets continued protecting the artillery chariots, wielding powerful crossbows as they advanced.
On the demon side, all attacks had now ceased, and they were glaring at the others like tigers watching their prey. The demons in the front ranks focused solely on defense. Even when blasted by the artillery chariots, they stood their ground without dodging or flinching.
Then Yu Lei let out an enraged roar, and all the demons unleashed their souls, charging together toward Ye Liuyun and the others.
Countless souls streaked toward them at incredible speed. The terrifying pressure bearing down on their souls made the soldiers’ legs tremble.
“What a magnificent sight!” Lei Ming couldn’t help exclaiming in admiration.
The demon beasts, however, did not panic at all, because they all knew that Ye Liuyun was the Lord of the Netherworld, with an innumerable army of ghosts at his command.
Ye Liuyun also began summoning the Netherworld Prison. He had already finished communicating with Zhuge Feiyu and Shura, and Shura had his troops ready for battle.
The timing was perfect. Countless demon souls were currently besieging their defensive formation. The soul attacks were most numerous and fiercest around Ye Liuyun. He and the demon beasts were also constantly using Soul-Sealing Pearls to capture the souls.
Once he had summoned the Gate of Hell, he resolutely walked straight out of the defensive formation arranged by Qiong Qi. He used the Soul-Refining Cauldron to seal off the entrance to his sea of consciousness, allowing any demon souls bold enough to charge in to rush directly into the cauldron, where they were shattered and refined.
Otherwise, there were simply too many ghosts attacking him for his Myriad Gods Command to handle.
Yu Lei led several demons with powerful souls in focusing their attacks on Ye Liuyun and the demon beasts. However, this defensive formation had been arranged by Qiong Qi, and they could not break through it for the time being.
When the Gate to the Netherworld suddenly appeared, the aura of death it emanated filled all the demon souls with terror.
But Yu Lei knew that it was already too late to call for a retreat. All he could do was kill as many as possible.
As countless ghost troops poured out of the Gate to the Netherworld, Yu Lei was frantic with worry. Leading the demon souls, he desperately charged the formation again and again.
When they saw Ye Liuyun suddenly walk out, they had no time to think. Every one of them charged desperately into Ye Liuyun’s sea of consciousness.
“Big Brother is making a huge profit this time!” Lei Ming watched with intense envy.
She did not know that Ye Liuyun had placed the Soul-Refining Cauldron over the entrance to his sea of consciousness. She simply assumed that the Myriad Gods Command would immobilize the souls for him, allowing Ye Liuyun to put them directly into the Soul-Refining Cauldron.
At the same time, the ghosts’ wails and howls filled the entire starry sky. The demonic qi in the starry sky was dispersed, replaced entirely by a chilling, sinister aura.
That deathly, ghostly aura made every living person tremble.
All the soldiers remained inside the formation. The ghosts did not attack them, focusing instead on killing the souls in the starry sky.
Some demon souls wanted to return to their physical bodies, but by then they could no longer do so. Surrounded by an army of tens of millions of ghosts, they faced no fate but being devoured.
Time passed very slowly in the world of souls. The battle between the souls felt to everyone as though it had lasted half a day. They watched as the demon souls were surrounded by the ghosts, gradually devoured and destroyed, until nothing remained but ghosts drifting through the starry sky.
In reality, less than a quarter of an hour had passed.
The battle on Ye Liuyun’s side had ended long ago. At least a hundred demon powerhouses’ soul essences, along with several hundred relatively powerful souls, had charged directly into the Soul-Refining Cauldron.
As soon as these souls entered the Soul-Refining Cauldron, they were shattered and crushed, their souls scattered and destroyed.
The Soul-Sealing Pearls in the demon beasts’ hands were all full as well. Ye Liuyun borrowed one of them, put the souls inside into the Soul-Refining Cauldron, and emptied it. He planned to use the empty Soul-Sealing Pearl to store the soul essence refined by the Soul-Refining Cauldron.
“How powerful must this soul essence be?”
“Can a single Soul-Sealing Pearl hold it?”
The demon beasts grew curious as well.
Ye Liuyun could only make a guess. “If it’s soul essence that has already been refined, it should fit. Storing it in a Soul-Sealing Pearl will let us release it in batches and absorb it. Otherwise, this soul essence would definitely be too vast for anyone to absorb and refine all at once!”
By then, the ghosts had already returned to the Netherworld Prison under Shura’s leadership.
Ye Liuyun called out a greeting to Shura, but he had no time to chat.
He still had to immediately arrange for the battlefield to be cleared. Fewer than a million demons remained on the other side, but there were still at least six or seven hundred thousand of them. They now lay as corpses, drifting through the starry sky.
The resources and corpses in their storage rings were all valuable cultivation resources for the demon army. Xuanyuan Ling could even use them to exchange for a considerable amount of other cultivation resources.
“Clear the battlefield. Store the corpses, weapons, and storage rings separately!”
Ye Liuyun immediately ordered Xiao Heng and Li Zhaoyuan to send troops to clean up.
Lei Ming’s demonic beasts also rushed out, selecting demons of higher realms to extract their essence cores, preserve their corpses, and collect their cultivation resources.
In that short time, Xiao Heng and Li Zhaoyuan’s armies had lost more than ten thousand soldiers. The souls of another twenty thousand or more soldiers had been damaged, rendering them incapable of fighting.
If the ghosts from the Netherworld Prison had not arrived in time, the entire army might have been wiped out by the demons.
Looking at the hundreds of thousands of intact demon corpses floating in the starry sky, Ye Liuyun could not help sighing at the terror of a battle between souls.
“The power of these soul attacks really is terrifying! The next time we fight the demon army, we can have the ghosts of the Netherworld come help us and reduce our soldiers’ losses!”
This also gave him an idea. If the demons insisted on fighting with their soul power like this again, he would send out the ghost army to deal with them.
After communicating with Zhuge Feiyu and Shura earlier, he had learned that the Netherworld’s standing ghost army currently numbered fifty million. They had all been weeded out and selected, and those with realms that were too low had been discarded.
The rest served as reserve troops scattered throughout the Netherworld. If necessary, Shura could recruit another army of fifty million at any time.
If the entire ghost army were released, it could easily wipe out the Sacred Demon Galaxy.
However, that would defeat the purpose of training the troops. The armies of Xiao Heng and Jiang Yuanhai had formerly been enemy soldiers who surrendered, and they were praetorian who had grown accustomed to a life of comfort. They needed to undergo sufficient tempering through war before they could be trained into qualified soldiers of the Death Legion.
Ye Liuyun’s goal was not to wipe out the entire Sacred Demon Galaxy, but to acquire resources and improve his own strength and that of his soldiers.
Therefore, unless the demons launched this kind of battle between souls, he would not summon the ghosts of the Netherworld to help. After all, they were two different worlds, and he would avoid using the Netherworld’s power whenever possible.