“This is absurd.”

Deng Xiangjun put away his Dao token and looked ahead.

He was only a little on the weak side among the Nanhong Seven. Whatever else, he was still a great cultivator at the late stage of the Earth Realm.

And that late stage of the Earth Realm was only because he had opened just three immortal cities at the White Jade Capital.

After all, the seven sects had never been any lofty power to begin with—otherwise they wouldn't have needed to ally and found their sects together. It had all been for self-preservation. They had only risen later, suddenly, through a chance turn of fortune. How could they have scraped together seven prodigies able to open four cities to serve as Sect Masters?

As the years went by—

the four sects of Nanyang, Clear-Moon, Spirit-Peak and Heaven-Sword were really on a different level from the other three.

In effect, they had been dragging the rest along.

With help from these fellow disciples, Deng Xiangjun's realm had stalled, but his foundation had grown ever richer. In a real fight he was no weaker than a cultivator at Earth Realm Perfection.

And here in Nanhong, he could even borrow a little of the other sects' treasured sites' power. You could say he had no equal below the Heaven Realm.

Even so, he still couldn't understand how the other two brothers had also found Sect Master Shen's trail.

Could there really be a method so wondrous in the world, one that let a Dao-merging cultivator dart back and forth across the whole of Nanhong and appear on several battlefields at once?

What a joke!

If there were such a wondrous means, why bother dividing things into four Hongs at all? The North Dragon Palace would simply rule all of Hongze itself. There would never have been any chance for the Nanhong Seven or the Boundless Dao-Sovereign Sect to grow.

And yet—

Deng Xiangjun frowned hard. He had indeed sensed the aura of a Dao-merging great demon falling, and he had rushed after it without daring to rest even a moment.