Under Perfected Master Qingfeng's gaze, Shen Yi quietly finished the beef, Chen Zhong's abandoned portion included. The medicinal potency held in the fine dish was absorbed by the path infant, while the truly essential demon-emperor flesh and blood turned into twelve drops of demon blood, taken into his sea of qi.

He set down his chopsticks. His expression had long since returned to normal.

It had to be said, the news Wutong Mountain had passed on did indeed throw Shen Yi's plans into disarray. He even felt an impulse to return to Great Qian at once.

Great Qian's importance to Shen Yi now went without saying — the equivalent of his home base. Once the Nine Provinces toppled, without enough accumulated faith to sustain it, the golden body would advance not an inch. And once it was damaged, that would be a permanent wound, one impossible to recover by any other means. It would amount to using tens of thousands of years of demon lifespan to condense a "single-use" consumable. This was something he absolutely could not accept.

But once he'd calmed a little, a chill rose in Shen Yi's heart. Were he truly to go back and take up a guarding stance, that would be exactly what plunged himself and Great Qian together into a slow death.

When the Thousand Demon Den would take its revenge, he didn't know. Where it would strike from, he likewise didn't know. Just as Perfected Master Qingfeng had said, for demons, a revenge that lasted several hundred years wasn't reckoned very long at all. If he waited in vain at Great Qian all those years, with the resources there, his cultivation would struggle to gain anything more.

And what was more, even running at full stretch, getting from Lizhou to Qingzhou was no matter of a single day — while for a demon emperor to slaughter a city took no time at all. Made sport of like a guard dog, run ragged across Great Qian. Once mired in such a bog, Shen Yi would face the gravest problem of all: with his realm…