“……” Outside the dim Dragon King's Hall, figure after figure stood with their hands at their sides.

Most of them were old men with white hair and beards, dressed in fine robes, with a distinguished air about them. Yet before this towering hall they had lost their usual composure, and meekly let a young man look them over.

“Three cities.”

“Three cities.”

Xue Yan walked past these so-called sect masters one by one, visibly bored, until he came to the next one. He raised an eyebrow and stared at the old man in front of him with open disbelief. “Dao-merging on two cities?”

Faced with scorn he didn't bother to hide, that sect master lowered his head in shame.

A sect in decline had no one coming up behind, but a treasured site couldn't be left standing empty.

“Heh.”

Xue Yan turned to look at the Yue family's clan-guardian elder. He didn't say anything, but that one laugh was enough to fill the Xihong cultivators with bitter resentment.

If they thought so little of them, why use them at all?

Worried they couldn't beat the Myriad Demon Hall, and still picking and choosing—playing the whore and wanting a chastity arch too. How low could they get!

“……” Yue Gonggui lowered his head, smiled without a sound, and gently rubbed his temple.

Xue Yan might only be a four-city cultivator, but in Beihong—and above all at an immortal sect the size of the Boundless Dao-Sovereign Sect—opening four immortal cities was only the bare minimum for being chosen as a branch sect master. In the last several tens of thousands of years, they had chosen only one or two.

This Sect Master Xue had stood out from among several famous four-city prodigies. At the same realm, they had also competed on insight into their techniques, their Dao weapons, and the Dao methods they had grasped.

Then again, even by the Yue family's standards, these cultivators were far too poor.

That was probably why the Myriad Demon Hall ran rampant in Xihong while not a whisper of it was heard in Beihong or…