Chapter 52: Hello, Mirage Demon
Inside the Celestial Master Hall lies the Fire Prison, where a thousand-year-old Mirage Demon has been sealed — a secret known only to the sect masters of the major clans and a handful of elders.
Three hundred years ago, this demon wreaked havoc in the northern lands. Bloodthirsty and violently insane, it cultivated by drinking human blood. It even slaughtered an entire border city, using the population as a living blood sacrifice. Countless celestial masters went to subdue it, but all were devoured. Even the great aristocratic families lost their strongest to it.
The Mirage Demon grew stronger with each massacre, destroying three cities in succession and leaving nothing but corpses in its wake. Just as it was about to invade the Central Plains, the Three Great Sects, Four Main Schools, and Six Noble Families united for the first time in history. They sacrificed countless talented disciples and finally managed to defeat and seal the demon here.
From that day on, the cultivator world realized there were terrors beyond ordinary imagination. To protect the human realm, the sects laid aside grudges and founded the Celestial Master Hall — partly to unite exorcists under one banner, and partly to guard and suppress this demon.
Over the next three centuries, the Mirage Demon’s power slowly waned. Its name was gradually forgotten, and even the entrance to the Fire Prison was lost to time. Only each generation’s Hall Master holds a single teleport talisman — used once a year when the seal is weakest, to check its status.
But Xu Qingfeng, the current Hall Master, had never imagined the entrance to the Fire Prison was right beneath this very examination hall — and that a first-time examinee would stumble into it by accident.
Xu wasn’t worried about the Mirage Demon escaping. What truly made his heart sink was the thought of losing such a rare talent. The Fire Prison was riddled with lethal arrays meant to slay demons. Even a master like Elder Jiao would hesitate to enter, let alone a young disciple.
His first instinct was: “Quickly, rescue that disciple!”
After all, it was their oversight that led to this disaster.