"Then out here let us address one another as old friends. Please sit inside, Fellow Daoist Shen; I'll handle the treasure ship."

Shen Yi had given her face, and Liu Qianyun was not about to be neglectful in return. She stood courteously at the bow and began telling him about Hongze.

In the vast ocean there was a Hidden Dragon, who led the water-kin and held the waters and lands of Hongze.

But the place still fell under the Celestial Court's jurisdiction.

So an exalted immortal of the Celestial Court had descended, bearing a decree, to sit in authority over Hongze. But immortals have no mind for worldly affairs, and so things remained as they had been, with the water-kin honoured as sovereign.

The Nanhong Seven were a colossus in their own region, sheltered by seven great Dao-merging earthly immortals, passed down generation to generation and almost never broken — transcendent, above the common run.

Liu Qianyun was a steward of the Clear-Moon Sect.

In her telling, the Nanhong Seven naturally held an exalted position and ruled their region.

Shen Yi and Li Qingfeng listened quietly, exchanging a glance now and then.

Neither of them was born yesterday.

It was easy enough to strip the water out of what Liu Qianyun said.

However gloriously she spun it, nothing changed the fact that water-demons were sovereign here. Transcendent, she called them, and yet confined to this one stretch of Nanhong — better to say they had more than enough to defend themselves and not enough to expand.

But Shen Yi had not the slightest thought of looking down on them.

Liu Qianyun had, after all, mentioned the Celestial Court a second time — and had spoken of gods and immortals.

She was no mortal, but a formidable cultivator at the third layer of Return-to-Void.

The immortal she spoke of was in all likelihood real.

To manage more than enough to defend oneself in a place watched over by an immortal was already an outrageous thing.

"An immortal…"

Shen Yi drew his gaze back and looked down past the ship.

With the…