He hesitated a moment, then continued anyway. "By rights, with Great Qian having received Xuanguang Cave's help, I shouldn't be speaking ill of them behind their backs — but I'll say a few words more all the same."

He suspected that once he reached the War Temple, he'd have little chance of seeing Shen Yi again.

Jiang Yuanhua carefully organized his thoughts, hoping to lay out everything that needed saying. "The three-sect alliance stands together against the Thousand Demon Den. Back when the arrangement was first struck, each power agreed to take a five-hundred-year turn as the main bulwark, rotating through in sequence, so each side would have time to rest and recover."

"And by 'main bulwark,' they mean fielding Spirit-Transformation-tier cultivators."

He sighed. "Great Qian's own Spirit-Transformation cultivators have all fallen, one after another, and the one Ancestor left alive has a damaged divine spirit besides. Wutong Mountain stepped in afterward and set new terms — until the War Temple's Ancestor recovers, the other two sects each send a Spirit-Transformation cultivator to stand in for the War Temple against the demons. Counts as quite the act of mercy, really."

At that, Shen Yi finally gained a clearer picture of how things stood beyond Qingzhou's borders.

He just couldn't quite tell why the General was bringing all this up.

Jiang Yuanhua let out a helpless sigh. "But once the others are supplying the Spirit-Transformation cultivators, the War Temple's in no position to fight for command authority either. So for these five hundred years, every Mixed Origin Grandmaster across the whole of Great Qian has been pulled away and put under the immortal sects' orders entirely... reasonable enough, on the face of it."

"But that's exactly where the trouble lies. If it's Wutong Mountain, it's not so bad — those Perfected Masters run cold and standoffish, and won't bother much with outsiders, but they won't go out of their way to target you either. Do what they ask of you, and they leave the rest alone — much like our own demon-hunters."

At this point in the conversation, Jiang Qiulan slowly…