High in a desolate blue sky, a middle-aged man of imposing build stood with his hands at his sides.

His hair was combed up without a strand out of place, and showed black and white together; the thick fur mantle over his shoulders was mottled black and white in the same way.

His back was straight as a rod, and his eyes were still as water.

Only the terrible speed with which each stride carried his figure across a thousand hills and ten thousand waters gave off any flavor of a hunt.

The Bright-Moon Frost Tiger clan stood in Xihong as a first-rank power second only to the Dragon Palace.

Its clan chief was naturally a great personage with a famous name across this boundless span of water and land.

There were very few things in the world that could throw An Tingfeng into any confusion, and the present business was not one of them.

Even though this business truly was very strange.

As clan chief he had forced out nearly seven parts in ten of the whole clan's strength, and had gone to Beihong on top of that to beg a sect's help with bitter persistence, before the Treasure-Moon great tomb could be built at all. And it had been broken into as simply as this.

The Treasure-Moon Soul-Suppressing Grand Formation, which could certainly have held out until he arrived even against another Dao-merging being, might as well have stopped working for no reason.

And stranger still, by the time he came the great tomb was still whole and undamaged.

Of course, none of that mattered. Even if all eighteen of those pillars of the clan had fallen it would make no difference; he had never meant to let this pack of tomb-keeping tiger demons leave the Treasure-Moon great tomb.

That much the Bright-Moon Frost Tiger clan had owed him from the beginning.

The one thing he cared about was how to get his little daughter back.

Whether there had been a traitor within or something else altogether, to anybody but An Tingfeng himself the most valuable thing in…