When the sky-wide sea of blood had rolled back, the Boundless Demon-Sovereign Palace vanished, and the heavens returned to clarity—

the golden flame melted into the black shirt.

The scorching heat all around cooled slowly back to normal.

Liu Qianyun quietly tucked the envelope back into her sleeve. She had a faint premonition. When her father gave her this decree, what he had in mind was probably some small trouble among stewards.

But on Shen Yi's showing today—

this decree might very well end up in the hands of another White Jade Capital power.

She could no longer quite make him out.

Every time they parted and met again, it was like meeting a different cultivator.

The watershed between the early and middle stages was a joke in front of him.

The most frightening part was that, once she reasoned it through carefully, the win actually made perfect sense.

A spirit-body method plainly at Major Accomplishment, two storeys of Heavenly Palace on top of that, and a profound technique of the kind one only ever saw in a prodigy's hands.

Which of those was a thing an ordinary cultivator could ever lay hands on?

"What's the matter with you?"

Yan Wencheng came out of his astonishment and looked at Ye Wenxuan beside him, who had not stopped wiping her forehead.

"N-nothing… I'm a little cold…"

The fright had caught up with Ye Wenxuan and reached its limit. Only a few days ago she had genuinely walked once round the gates of hell.

If a single thought had gone the other way then, and she had let slip the business of the Crimson-Eyed Mysterious Phoenix's blood essence—

then among the figures the sea of fire had just swallowed, this Ye would very likely have been one more.

"……"

Chen Zilong stared blankly at some point in the hall.

His body sagged, and he propped himself against the coffin. His father gone all at once, and then his brother.

And all of it only because he had once, by chance, seen Ziqi meeting the demon woman in secret.

He had plainly meant…