The benefit of having such a large form was obvious: Lu Sheng was able to absorb every single drop of Devil Essence in the altar.
Vast amounts of Devil Essence were refined by the fire of the Eight-Headed Divine Pearl into the purest Prime Devil Qi, nourishing all parts of Lu Sheng's body.
He could feel his power drastically increasing, but wasn't able to really tell by exactly how much.
There was a large chance that the Eight-Headed Divine Pearl possessed a power level equal to the Origin Power. Therefore, the eight Devil Bodies obtained from it would naturally be even more horrifyingly powerful.
Lu Sheng was at the level of an Upper Three Grades Holy Weapon Master. After his Yin Flame evolved to the Eight-Headed Divine Pearl, the tenacity of his body was strengthened to an extreme.
Plus he'd just absorbed vast amounts of Devil Essence from King Shadow. Despite the fact that King Shadow had been sealed away for quite a while and lost most of his Devil Essence, he was still a Devil King at the level of a Divine Weapon Master. The essence he had left was at least half as much as the amount he had had in his prime.
And Lu Sheng just absorbed this enormous amount of Devil Essence in one go.
The funniest thing about this was that Lu Sheng was supposed to have exploded from the excessive amounts of Devil Essence he absorbed and become nourishment for King Shadow.
Unfortunately, he had Deep Blue.
Each and every time he reached his limit, Lu Sheng'd immediately start evolving his Ultimate Eight-Headed Devil Way to a new stage with Deep Blue.
And so the pressure that his body had to bear was drastically reduced. He spent 200 units of Mental Energy but also avoided death by explosion, managing to absorb every single drop of King Shadow's Devil Essence.
After these two monumental changes, Lu Sheng's body finally broke though to a new stage. Right now, his body was at a mysteriously stable stage that even he himself couldn't figure out.
Countless amounts of Prime Devil Qi started to phase-change into liquid, and slowly began to flow within his body. Strangely, every single piece of muscle in his body contained at least thirty different patterns of Prime Devil Qi.
Prime Devil Qi had completely integrated with his flesh and blood, reaching an odd but extremely balanced state.
"Since there isn't any more Devil Essence… might as well go back." After all that, Lu Sheng wanted to leave.
He managed to find the monster, the altar, and Prime Devil Qi one after another in this place. If he had Mental Energy left, this would've been a perfect place to cultivate. But unfortunately, Lu Sheng had used up almost all of his Mental Energy at this point.
After the Ultimate Eight-Headed Devil Way had been improved to a new stage, his martial arts and secret arts were all at a point where there was nothing more to cultivate.
If not for the abundant Devil Essence here, he would have taken over half a year to collect all the Devil Qi needed to alter his body to his current stage.
Lu Sheng's body shrunk rapidly to his everyday size. Then, he looked around. The evil whispers had disappeared as if they had been cut off after all of the Devil Essence disappeared.
After moving the altar, there appeared another stone door. Faint traces of Devil Qi constantly flowed through the door.
Lu Sheng frowned and walked towards it to check.
The stone door was about two bodies wide and covered in cracks. On both sides of the cracks were tiny and dense runes. All of the runes formed a giant eye, as if it was staring at whoever was standing in front of the door.
However the strangest thing was that the direction that the door was facing... the door was facing towards the ceiling of the cavern.
Lu Sheng hesitated, but still knelt and breathed in a sliver of Devil Qi.
"Hmm? This Devil Qi is… strange."
Even though the amount of Devil Qi permeating through the door couldn't compare in sheer quantity with the one at the altar, but it was even more condensed than the water of Poison Mist River.
Furthermore, it had certain things mixed in that made it feel completely different, as if this Devil Qi was more tame and had more depth.
"Roarrr..."
A faint roar could be heard through the door, like there was something hidden below that wanted to get out.
"Under here should be the next layer with a stronger seal. But what in the world is this roaring sound? Judging by the altar, the devil sealed within shouldn't have broken through the seal…" Lu Sheng pressed lightly on the door and wavered for a moment, but he still used a blood net to pull the door up.
"Snap..."
The gray white stone door slowly opened, exposing the humid pitch-black space below.
Lu Sheng again hesitated a little, but still decided to enter. He lightly jumped down the doorway and landed on the group with a slight sound.
But the scene he saw immediately made his pupils retract.
This was a cavern exactly like the one above, and in the middle stood an even larger altar.
Unlike the last one, however, this one was completely splintered.
An ancient and rotten smell flowed through the air. The huge cavern was filled with splintered pieces of the altar, human clothing, and a pile of pale white bones in the corner.
The pile of bones looked inconspicuous, as if a natural fit for this place, like sundries in someone's house.
Lu Sheng looked around. With the faint light coming from above, he saw giant claw marks all around the cavern, as if some huge beast had struggled madly in here.
"The altar here… has been broken long ago??" His face darkened: a broken altar meant that the devil sealed within had escaped long ago.
But the suspicious part was why had the Prime Devil Sect not done anything when a devil escaped? And why did the devil, sealed for a millennium, quietly escape without any thoughts of revenge?
Lu Sheng wasn't sure what to make of the whole thing, and cautiously walked toward the altar.
"Hiss..."
Suddenly, he heard the trickling of sand from all around.
Lu Sheng peered into the shadow and saw two meter-tall humanoid shapes formed from the sand walking towards him.
"I can't sense any strong Devil Qi. Is it another monster created from contamination?" Lu Sheng looked at the two sandmen and moved his blood net slightly.
"Snap! Snap!"
After two crisp snaps, the two sandmen disintegrated into normal gray sand in the blink of an eye.
Blood Net, as a powerful skill that Lu Sheng derived when he was practicing martial arts, was being used more and more fluidly by him. Combined with the negative power field from the Ultimate Eight-Headed Devil Way, no one under Snake level would even be worthy to speak to Lu Sheng when he pulled out his Blood Net.
Instant kill.
Stepping over the two piles of sand, Lu Sheng stepped in front of the altar.
He softly touched the splintered altar; there was a giant opening that looked like someone had smashed the altar with an immense force.
"Destroyed by an outside force…" He frowned.
"Whoosh!"
Fire swooshed out of Lu Sheng's hand and lit up his surrounding.
Lu Sheng maintained the fire with his Qi and started to slowly inspect the cavern.
Soon, Lu Sheng found a skeleton with clothes that hasn't completely decayed yet.
He picked up the cloth with his feet and found it was still intact, so he tried to put it on.
However, right as he picked it up, the skeleton moved slightly and dropped a metal gourd about half a palm's width wide.
"What is this…?" Lu Sheng grabbed at the gourd and it flew into his hand.
A wave of mental energy started to emit from the gourd.
"Even this thing has mental energy…? 20 units, not much." Lu Sheng finished absorbing the mental energy and threw it away casually.
Right now he was precisely lacking mental energy. Throwing away the gourd, Lu Sheng walked toward the second skeleton.
This time, he found a metal soft-tipped brush. Aside from the tip that had turned to dust, the brush yielded ten units of Mental Energy.
"Interesting…" Lu Sheng was intrigued and decided to find more skeletons. There was still a lot of skeletons next to the walls, and many of them looked intact enough to have items on them.
"Roarrr!"
Suddenly, Lu Sheng heard a lion roar, and a blurry shadow started to form in the middle of the cavern.
"Since I'm down here, might as well check if there is any more mental energy. Also, I should clear some of the monsters here to give the Prime Devil Sect above a better foundation." Lu Sheng hesitated for a moment but still decided to investigate the source of the voice.
Evolving the Ultimate Eight-Headed Devil Way just once required 200 units of Mental Energy. The rate at which he expended mental energy had drastically increased.
The 10 or 20 units here and there were like a fly's worth of meat to Lu Sheng. He desperately needed more Mental Energy to prepare for further evolution of his Devil Body. This place looked ancient and had a high chance of containing items with Mental Energy.
"Whoosh!"
Suddenly, a beam of green light hit Lu Sheng square in the chest.
The green light was clearly highly corrosive and accurately landed on Lu Sheng's chest. He felt slight pain.
He was in his Extreme Yin Form right now, with the smallest and the weakest defense. After getting hit, Lu Sheng saw that the skin around the wound was gradually turning into stone.
"Might as well use the Secret Art of Prime Devil to clear this. I can probably absorb a substantial amount of Prime Devil Qi in the process." He peered towards where the green beam came from and saw a giant white wolf walking towards him on two legs in the dark.
The wolf's eyes were blood-red, with a half-circle of runes on his forehead and green light flashing in his mouth.
"ARH-WOOO..."
The wolf was two meters tall and just matched Lu Sheng height; it was letting out an unending, terrifying roar.
"A new species I haven't seen…" Lu Sheng said to himself. He wiped his hand and walked towards him casually.
"ARH-WOOO..."
The giant wolf lunged forward with sweeping claws and biting jaw, the whole sequence done in a fluid fashion. It showed remarkable explosiveness.
But Lu Sheng was faster.
His right hand darted out and precisely pressed onto the runes on the wolf's forehead.
"Bam!!"
His palm connected with the wolf's head, causing an explosion of white dust. The force of his strike pierced through the wolf's head and its eyes gradually lost their light.
A swirl of purple flame immediately started burning on the wolf, lighting up a small patch of the dark cavern.
"This quantity??" Feeling the pure wave of Devil Qi entering his body, Lu Sheng was briefly stunned.
The amount of Devil Qi far exceeded his expectation. It almost reached one hundredth of what he had stored in total.
"How could it have that much?"
He released the body of the wolf and let it turn into ash on its own.