Not there?

The stewards passed the news swiftly back to the people behind them.

Inside the six remaining sects, a good many heads came up in astonishment.

Among them, naturally, was Bai Wu, who was better informed than anyone. He set the Dao token down, tongue-tied. "He's — he's really not there?"

If before it had been no more than a stray connection—

now that Shen Yi was not in the Nanyang Sect, the suspicion on him became very real indeed.

But Bai Wu truly could not figure it out. This Sect Master Shen was newly arrived; getting to know Liu Shiqian and Chiyang and the other Clear-Moon elders at all had been hard enough. And he had gone on to have formidable Dao-sons like Su Hongxiu and Wei Yuanzhou stand up for him — the man's methods were frankly enough to strike anyone dumb.

And now the man had gone around the Nanhong Seven altogether, found help elsewhere, and at the risk of offending the Dragon Palace beyond repair had had a great swathe of water-kin demons viciously butchered on his behalf.

And all to vent one breath of anger?!

It had not once crossed Bai Wu's mind that Shen Yi might have done the thing himself.

The first possibility was frightening enough. The second lay entirely outside anything he could grasp.

"How odd."

Bai Wu rolled over and sat up. He found that he had suddenly taken a little interest in the Seven-Sect Assembly.

He had had no chance to see the man at the Cloud-Empyrean Pavilion last time, and now he really did want to look with his own eyes at just what sort of person this much-talked-of Sect Master Shen was.

What Bai Wu was thinking stood for what was in the minds of most of the immortal sects' experts.

Shen Yi had not been out of the Nanyang treasured site long, after all, and to most people the impression of him was still a young cultivator who had picked up a Dao-merging treasured site by luck and had little chance of holding on to it.