More than ten days passed in the blink of an eye.

Wu Dao'an walked with a slight stoop, hands clasped behind his back, pacing through the Jia section — looking for all the world like an ordinary old man nearing the end of his days.

Divine spirit after divine spirit stepped quietly aside as he approached.

No one spoke to him. They simply watched in silence as he passed.

Without the golden booklet at his side, there was no longer any reason for him to preside over War Temple refinement sessions — he no longer counted as a rotating Custodian.

But that wasn't why the other Martial Immortals had grown distant.

Overstepping his authority.

Taking advantage of the Ancestor's sleep to make a decision of this magnitude without consulting a single one of his fellow disciples in the Jia section, as though none of them existed.

"I don't want Junior Brother Shen to become a second Senior Brother Zhu."

"And yet Old Ghost Wu is walking him step by step toward exactly that fire pit."

A few of the Martial Immortals stared indifferently in the direction the old man had gone.

From the very day Shen Yi entered the War Temple, he'd been given the Golden Wolf jade token. A little over a month later, he had the rotating Custodian's golden booklet in hand.

Not one obstacle, not one moment of difficulty, throughout any of it.

Every last bit of that — Wu Dao'an's doing.

The old man had made a decision for the entire War Temple. So who exactly had given him that authority?

"The accumulated faith that booklet represents is down by thirty percent over the past several days," someone said quietly.

The thing they'd worried about most had come to pass. Junior Brother Shen's constitution was genuinely extraordinary — and the appetite that came with it matched.

Whether there was any immediate use for it or not, it was all going in first, to be dealt with later.

"Should we make a move while he hasn't noticed yet — grab a portion for ourselves and hold it…