High among the steep cliffs, a white robe billowed.

Shen Yi looked out in silence at the land below. All that met his eye was cloud and mist; of the world's true face he could make out nothing.

The mountain wind, he noticed suddenly, carried a faint chill.

He seemed to be standing somewhere too high up.

Ye Wenxuan had put herself at the first layer of Return-to-Void. This wooden man was plainly among the very strongest in that realm, and it had still come to an end as wretched as this.

Set against that, even if Shen Yi's strength exceeded Ye Wenxuan's, in this world that hardly made him anything out of the ordinary.

From what the middle-aged man of the Clear-Moon Sect had said a moment ago,

Shen Yi worked it out quickly enough: the powers behind those six Dao tokens ranked below a Sect Master. With the strength he had now, holding a position that high would not be easy.

He glanced sideways at the wooden man. "The Nanhong Seven. Is this place called Nanhong?"

Li Xuanqing's mind was entirely inside the Nanyang Sect, but it answered seriously all the same. "This place is called Hongze. We are in its south."

"And how do the Seven stand with one another?" The question mattered a great deal to Shen Yi.

"They share life and death." Li Xuanqing answered without hesitation.

"……"

Shen Yi was silent a moment, committing to nothing. "Then why, in all these years, has not one of them cared what was happening inside the Nanyang Sect? Could they not break the formation?"

"A Sect Master could break it. But this place would be destroyed in the doing." Li Xuanqing looked at Shen Yi. From the demon blood on him, not yet fully dry, it could guess well enough at what had gone on inside.

"The most precious thing about the Nanyang Sect is the Nanyang Sect."

"How do you mean?" Shen Yi was mildly curious. He did not quite see it — there was nothing inside the sect that could carry a cultivator even as…