Su Bai raised his hand, and a pale, chilling flame flickered to life on his fingertips.

He flicked the Ashen-Frost Blight Flame onto the mangled corpse of the gaunt demon. The fire didn’t burn with heat. It froze and disintegrated. Within seconds, the 5th Stage Foundation Establishment cultivator was reduced to a neat pile of gray ash, leaving behind only a heavy storage ring.

Su Bai picked it up, then slipped it into his robes. He didn’t have time to delay. A patrol could arrive at any moment.

He walked over to the lead carriage containing the hollowed-out adults. Standard spatial storage rings rejected living beings because the spatial compression would crush a living soul. But dead bodies and inanimate objects? Those could be stored perfectly.

Since the adults were technically just organic smuggling containers now, Su Bai waved his hand. The massive carriage vanished, sucked into the demon’s storage ring. He needed to preserve the evidence for the inevitable audit.

That left one massive problem. The second carriage containing Yan’er and the five other unconscious children.

Su Bai summoned his high-grade flying sword, then let it hover horizontally in the air. But instead of stepping onto it, he raised his hands and activated Nether-Thread Puppetry.

He spun thick, unbreakable cables of heavily condensed Yin Qi. Then, he tethered the front axle of the heavy wooden carriage directly to the hilt of his flying sword.

He had essentially turned his majestic, immortal flying sword into a heavy-duty tow truck.

To ensure the carriage didn’t tear apart in the sky, Su Bai coated the entire wooden structure in a frictionless Qi bubble. The wind would seamlessly glide over the wood, providing perfect aerodynamics.

Finally, he noticed a critical flaw in his logistics. Flying at high altitudes would expose the sleeping children to freezing temperatures, thin air, and crushing G-forces.

To solve this, Su Bai used another application of his Forest Canopy Breath. He funneled his Wood Qi through the towing cables, and filled the interior of the carriage with purified, oxygen-rich, temperature-controlled air.

He had successfully built a pressurized, first-class airline cabin out of a medieval wagon.

With his passengers secured, Su Bai formed a hand seal. The flying sword shot into the sky. It dragged the carriage smoothly behind it.

Once they hit cruising altitude and Su Bai verified the children were breathing comfortably, he finally diverted some of his attention to the demon’s storage ring.

It was time for an in-flight audit.

He poured a fraction of his Spiritual Sense into the ring, and his face immediately darkened.

Sitting on the shelves inside the ring were dozens of Blood Pills. Su Bai felt a wave of profound disgust.

A "Blood Pill" wasn’t made of herbs. It was literally a human being (or dozens of them) tossed into a Demonic cauldron and violently boiled down. The demonic fire burned away the physical flesh and compressed their raw life force into a single, highly condensed pill. It was the ultimate, horrifying biological compression algorithm.

Next to the pills were gruesome surgical kits. Soul-barbed hooks, marrow-extraction syringes, and rusted bone saws.

Then, he found the ledgers.

Su Bai pulled a thick, leather-bound notebook from the ring and began reading it while simultaneously piloting his towing sword. As his eyes scanned the pages, his frown deepened into a terrifying scowl.

The notebook was a detailed diary and logistical record of the demon’s operations. The further Su Bai read, the darker the reality of the cultivation world became.

He read entries detailing the acquisition and consumption of infants.

According to the demonic texts, a baby was born completely pure, filled with untainted, primeval Innate Qi from the heavens. As a person grew older, breathed dirty air, experienced mortal emotions, and ate normal food, their meridians became clogged with "impurities." 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

To a Demonic Cultivator, an infant was a premium, fully-charged, 100% pure battery. Consuming their Innate Qi provided a massive, flawless power spike without any of the toxic impurities that caused cultivation bottlenecks.

’So they are running an elite, underground trafficking ring for corrupt upper management... truly the Epstein Files of the cultivation world,’ Su Bai sighed as he rubbed his temples to stave off a headache.

The diary also revealed a fascinating, pathetic truth about the Demonic Cultivation path itself.

Orthodox cultivation required a Spiritual Root. Demonic cultivation did not. That was its greatest selling point to the desperate masses. However, forcing Qi into a mortal body without a Spiritual Root was like pouring water into a cracked cup. It constantly leaked.

To survive, lesser demonic cultivators like the gaunt man he had just killed had to constantly consume human lives just to plug the leaks in their foundation. It was a violent, biological Ponzi scheme.

But the children with actual Spiritual Roots, like Yan’er, weren’t eaten. They were kidnapped, brainwashed, and trained as the next generation of Demonic executives. If Su Bai hadn’t intervened, Yan’er was destined to become a middle-management asset for the very people who hollowed out her mother.

"Sickening," Su Bai muttered as he snapped the book shut.

He cross-referenced the diary’s map of the "Charity Clinics" with his current location. He needed a place to drop the children where they wouldn’t be immediately recaptured by the demonic supply chain.

He looked at the map. Yan’er’s original village (the one she and her mother had fled from) was completely off the grid. It was the furthest settlement in the mortal kingdom, and according to the ledger, the Demonic Sect hadn’t bothered establishing a Charity Clinic there because the population was too small to warrant the investment.

’Perfect. It’s a blind spot in their franchise network.’

Su Bai banked his flying sword, and adjusted his coordinates.

It took him several hours of high-speed flying to locate the village. As he descended through the clouds, he saw that the young mother had been right. It was a ghost town.

The fields were black ash, and the few mortals who had stubbornly chosen not to abandon their ancestral homes were huddled inside collapsing huts. They were waiting for the miasma to slowly take them.

Su Bai landed silently in a dense thicket just outside the village borders.

He carefully lowered the carriage into a small clearing where the ambient miasma was relatively thin. The protective Wood Qi bubble surrounding the wagon was still active. It ensured the children inside would continue to sleep peacefully and breathe clean air.

Su Bai stepped away from the towing cables.

The desperate mortals in the distance stared blankly at the treeline, too exhausted and starved to even investigate the strange, dark carriage that had just descended from the sky.

Su Bai pulled his Moon-Shadow Cloak tight. Before he could figure out what to do with six orphaned children, he had to make sure they wouldn’t die of toxic exposure the moment they stepped outside.

He closed his eyes, expanding his Spiritual Sense across the village.

’Wait here, kids,’ Su Bai thought. His eyes snapped open and locked onto a dark well at the center of the town. ’Uncle has to go do some freelance environmental cleaning.’