The splendid treasure ship swept across the sky like a streak of light.

The ocean below looked like one whole thing; the jade-green waves rolled high and came down again heavily, with nothing at all out of the ordinary about them.

But Shen Yi, sitting cross-legged on the ship, slowly opened his eyes.

Whether it was a trick of the senses he could not say.

Just then he had suddenly felt himself cross a "line," and after it even the spiritual qi of heaven and earth around them had changed a little.

But there was nothing in sight, no formation or barrier of any kind.

"It is the Dragon Palace."

Ji Jingxi, the Clear-Moon Sect Master, stood with her hands at her sides and turned her eyes over, explaining quietly. "Four Dragon Palaces hold Hongze, and the boundaries are strict. It is because the Dragon Palaces came first that there is any distinction between Nanhong and Xihong at all."

Lord of Hongze was meant literally.

Ji Jingxi drew her gaze back. "Away from Nanhong it is not very convenient for me to show myself. I ask Sect Master Shen's pardon."

With that her figure vanished from where she stood. If her voice had not still been drifting, nobody would have noticed at all; it was as though no one had ever been there.

"……" Shen Yi knew the translocation art too, but even at full strength it would leave traces and an aura behind.

He could not begin to do it as soundlessly as Sect Master Ji.

The means of the Dao-merging realm were not a thing a Return-to-Void cultivator could guess at. If the gap was that great in details alone, there was no imagining what it would be in a straight fight.

And he had offended two experts of that order in one go — both of them, as it happened, great dragon sons of two Dragon Palaces.

Shen Yi rubbed the space between his brows with some helplessness.

To say he was not worried at all would be a lie. Fortunately both of them were being watched…