Shen Yi had not deliberately struck to kill, but he was cautious by nature, in the way of a lion that uses all its strength even to catch a rabbit.

Du Weiguang and the other two who had moved against him had kept their lives; but in any other power they would have amounted to men who had been crippled.

After they were carried into the great hall, though—

the Mountain-Moving Sect's crowd of White Jade Capital cultivators did not look particularly worried.

Practicing the spirit-body method meant close fighting, after all; sparring on ordinary days already injured them more easily than it did the disciples of other immortal sects, and without some means of nursing and mending, the whole sect would long since have been reduced to one man in ten.

And besides that—

the body-tempering strength Shen Yi had shown was also an important reason they could be so composed now.

So far as they knew, never mind the Seven — the whole of Nanhong had no sect whose main practice was body-tempering.

Which meant that in all likelihood this young cultivator had felt his way there on his own, and then arrived at a spirit-body cultivation that could crush these several Mountain-Moving personally transmitted disciples flat.

If he were given a mature method of practice, and it were supported by the Mountain-Moving Sect's great store of heaven-and-earth treasures, what he might attain was simply beyond reckoning.

The Nanhong Seven's Dao-sons could not possibly change sects; where in the world was there a greater temptation than a Dao-merging treasured site?

But the thing was… if memory served, when Wei Yuanzhou had called upon the mountain earlier, this ink-robed young man had not been named as a Dao-son. And that put a different face on it.

The Mountain-Moving Sect was quite confident it could pay a greater price than any single sect of the Nanhong Seven to draw this cultivator in.

At the thought Yang Yunheng's manner grew noticeably warmer.

He cupped his hands toward Wei Yuanzhou. "This old man knows why the Cloud-Soaring Dao-son has come. But our…