The wind soughed bleakly, the bamboo grove swaying like a mild expanse of green sea. But before this refreshing, soul-easing scene lay three whole corpses, their ragged husks bristling with sharp bamboo. Their interiors were hollow — the path infants, it seemed, already picked away by someone.

Dignified Mixed Origin Grandmasters, dead beneath seemingly ordinary green bamboo. Utterly absurd.

Zhang Mingyang stood with his hands behind his back, the black-and-white robe on his body swaying faintly. But the smile from his time outside was gone from his face now. His eyes were sunk in gloom, enough to make others shudder with cold.

The Xuanguang Cave disciple standing at his side, seeing his uncle-master's expression, could only pour his fright and fury out upon others. "A pack of useless trash! We gave you the route map, and to this moment there's not the slightest progress — what are you all good for?!"

Before the bamboo grove, two Mixed Origin Grandmasters held jade slips, their eyes bloodshot. What route map! Seventy-odd different variations, all of them guesses pulled from thin air — what damned use was this?! The three men before them had, all told, tested out twenty-odd wrong routes. And the two of them, if they wanted to live, had to find from the remaining routes that one path of survival that might not exist at all.

But they could only advance, never retreat. Because the bamboo grove ahead might still hold a way to live, but behind them lay certain death, ten times over. An unbridled Spirit-Transformation-realm expert was far more terrible than this bamboo grove.

"Where is Chen Zhong? Why hasn't he come."

Zhang Mingyang finally spoke, his voice cold as black ice. He'd had enough of this useless lot — not only low in cultivation, but wholly without formation-breaking experience, purely wasting time. Set against the well-trained Grandmasters of Great Qian, it was a bitter disappointment.

"Uncle-Master, he's probably hidden himself away." The Xuanguang Cave disciple said softly, "Fleeing before battle — once we're out, we'll have to teach him a lesson he won't forget."

"And I need…