World-saving Plan: The Only Savior

Chapter 1788 - 60: Plague Temple (Part 6)_2

After adding a layer of Spiritual Power Shield to himself, Zhang Xiaoman plunged headfirst into the Plague Source.

What met his eyes was not the yellowed scene he had imagined; everything around him was crystal clear. Zhang Xiaoman didn’t even feel like he had entered water at all. Instead, it felt as if he were in a hazy spatial domain, his body following the guidance of spatial ripples, drifting forward involuntarily. Very soon, he discovered a faint light not far ahead.

"Swoosh~"

Zhang Xiaoman stuck his head out from a small lake; at this moment, he was already in another vast underground space.

"So this is the inside of the Temple?"

He glanced around. This looked like an enormous underground cavity, much larger than the outside. Judging by his divine sense, its height was at least over a thousand meters, and its length and width extended for tens of kilometers. Unfortunately, the surroundings were all withered and desolate; at a glance, nothing could be seen.

"Hm? What’s that?"

Zhang Xiaoman flew a circuit around this underground space, and when he reached a certain corner, he suddenly saw something different.

Near the wall, a gigantic skeleton over five hundred meters tall was sitting with its back against it. The skeleton’s head drooped, six arms grew from its back, and a Giant Sword shrouded in black aura was thrust into its chest, as if someone had nailed it here with that sword.

"This is... the Plague God, Catastrophe?"

Combining it with the Divine Statue outside, Zhang Xiaoman immediately confirmed the identity of the massive bones before him; this must be the master of this ruin space, the one known as the Plague God, "Catastrophe."

"So Catastrophe really is dead. He should have been slain by the owner of that sword; otherwise, after so many years, this ruin wouldn’t have let outsiders come and go so freely..."

Zhang Xiaoman fixed his gaze on the enormous black sword embedded in the skeleton’s chest. It felt somewhat familiar, yet for the moment he couldn’t recall where he had seen it before.

"Eh? Are those Plague Guards?"

His attention was suddenly drawn to the dozens of statues standing before the skeleton, each tens of meters tall. They were clad in black armor, faces twisted and ferocious. Other than being in stone statue Status at the moment, they looked no different from the Plague Guards he had seen outside the Temple earlier, and the numbers matched as well—exactly one hundred.

"Looks like these guys are revived here. But I’ve been inside the Temple for quite a while and they still haven’t activated. Seems there’s no Array inside the Temple that can sense enemies. That’s good news."

Zhang Xiaoman let out a breath of relief. Before coming, he had already prepared to tangle with these Plague Guards. He had even kept the Holy Water he had Upgraded to orange level in his hand the whole time, just in case he ran into those hundred Control Level Plague Guards.

But now it seemed his worries had been unnecessary. Judging from their current Status, these Plague Guards shouldn’t be waking up anytime soon.

In the end, Zhang Xiaoman shifted his gaze to a "mound" not far from the colossal skeleton. But that wasn’t a mound at all—it was a small hill piled up from countless treasures.

"Finally found you!"

Seeing this, Zhang Xiaoman’s eyes couldn’t help but shine. Kung Fu pays off for the diligent; after such a long exploration, he had finally found the Plague God’s hoard in the underground space of this Temple.

He carefully scouted the surrounding environment again, and only after confirming there were no traps or dangers did he fly over toward that treasure heap.

"Flame Spirit Flower, Soul Summoning Stone, Cold Ice Ghost Soul, Purple Crystal Grapes, Absolute Worry Immortal Divine Grass... damn, is this the Heart of Eternity!?"

Zhang Xiaoman was stunned by what he saw. So many Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures were piled up as casually as knickknacks on a street stall.

Among these materials, the lowest were all third-level materials. He even discovered fourth-level Treasures, and many others whose names he didn’t even know; he could only tell how extraordinary they were from the Spiritual aura they contained.

Besides that, in this hill-sized pile of wealth before him, there were also many things sealed inside Treasure Boxes or other containers. Zhang Xiaoman carefully opened one or two and found that they were filled with high-quality Dark Spiritual Artifacts, though perhaps due to battles or some other reasons, most of them were not preserved intact, which was quite a pity.

The good news was, in one of the containers Zhang Xiaoman found the main objective of this expedition: scrolls recording Divine Domain Skills.

There weren’t many of these scrolls—only five in total—but while few in number, their quality was unquestionable. Anything the Plague God chose to collect was definitely a Treasure among Treasures.

Stuffing all of these into his storage in one go, Zhang Xiaoman showed a satisfied smile. The haul this time truly was substantial. Not only had he obtained Divine Domain Skills, he had also found many Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures, all of them exorbitantly valuable, with more than one peerless Treasure among them.

"Yunling Immortal Ganoderma! I’ve seen this on the Dark Web. It’s said to be an extremely rare fourth-level material that can directly raise one’s Spiritual Power cap when consumed! I didn’t expect there to be a stalk stored here. I heard its effects are astonishing—maybe I can give it a try..."

Zhang Xiaoman casually fished out a white ganoderma-like plant from the pile of Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures. From the constantly shifting patterns on its surface, he recognized what it was. However, he didn’t plan to take it right away. After all, he was still in the Plague Temple, a very dangerous place where he couldn’t afford any carelessness. He would wait until he returned to prepare thoroughly before consuming it. Perhaps, combined with other Spiritual Medicine or Arrays, he could further enhance its Spiritual Power-boosting effect.

After sorting through everything, Zhang Xiaoman was all the more pleased. The harvest from this operation would not only strengthen his own power, but also deepen the foundation of the Star Alliance. Having cleaned out the underground Treasure vault of the Temple, he then set his sights on the Temple itself.

Just as the people of the Rothschild family had said earlier, the Plague Temple was forged from Soul Summoning Stone, an extremely precious ore. A single piece could fetch an astronomical price at auction, let alone an entire palace built from Soul Summoning Stone.

Zhang Xiaoman planned to use the Dimension Gate to move it, bricks and all, into the Original Realm. As it happened, his Original Realm still lacked a place that could attract souls. With this Plague Temple, he wouldn’t have to trouble himself. He could directly use it as the gathering point for souls in the Original Realm, then guide those souls to be reborn, constructing a Reincarnation System unique to the Original Realm.

"Alright, the harvest from this trip is complete. Time to leave... Wait a second. The shouting I heard above earlier seems to have gone quiet, and I haven’t seen anyone else in here... Could it have been him talking?"

Zhang Xiaoman glanced at the massive skeleton with its head bowed over there. He had thoroughly searched this space from top to bottom and found nothing suspicious—apart from this colossal pile of bones in front of him.

"There’s no way it was really him speaking, right? This thing’s been dead for thousands of years. Could there still be a trace of aura left?"

As he was thinking this, his gaze on the skeleton suddenly froze; he sensed that something was off.

"That guy’s head... wasn’t like this when I first came here, was it...?"

Zhang Xiaoman’s pupils contracted sharply, because he suddenly realized something: the angle of the skeleton’s head seemed to have shifted ever so slightly—and the direction it had turned to was precisely the Treasure Storage where he had just been standing!