The Imperial Capital. The War Temple.

Wu Dao'an stood in the great hall, somewhat at a loss for what to do with himself.

Beside him, Aqing sat on the floor in a rare state of dejection, arms wrapped around her knees, shoulders trembling faintly.

Xu Wanyun crouched at her side, gently soothing her.

Yet this woman, steady as she appeared, had the same dazed look in her own eyes.

Two women who had spent long years shut away at home, who had only just begun to feel their wings grown strong, had for the first time stepped forward to make a decision on the family's behalf.

Only to be dealt a brutal slap by unfeeling reality.

The facts had proven it: the Xu family were nowhere near ready to leave their hiding place and walk openly through the world.

And their words had, in the end, swayed the Fifth Ancestor's judgment all the same.

The clan elders had led the family back onto this land — familiar and foreign at once — and before they'd even reached Great Qian, they'd been swept up in one clean net by their mortal enemies.

The whole affair had unfolded as smoothly as if Great Qian and Xuanguang Cave had been in league together.

What Aqing felt at this moment was less grief—

than a deep, crushing self-reproach, and worry for her kin.

"Auntie..." She clutched hard at Xu Wanyun's calf.

"Kill!"

Upon the offering altar, the Wrathful-Eyed Arhat's dharma form was viciously stamping on a cultivator in a black-and-white Daoist robe, the man already at his last gasp.

"Kill them all! Don't cry! Kill every last one of them!"

"Ancestor, do settle down."

Wu Dao'an glanced back helplessly. This situation had passed entirely beyond anything he could control.

Great Qian had exhausted every method it had to contact Shen Yi.

But the man might as well have vanished off the face of the earth.

Nearly every divine-spirit cultivator in the War Temple had been mobilized, taking every golden dharma form with them.

Assuming the posture of men ready to stake their lives.

Yet…