The middle-aged man claiming to be of the Heaven-Sword Sect finished speaking.

The remaining Dao tokens shivered faintly, and then two more projections stepped out of them.

"We can promise you the same terms."

The crescent-moon token, the first to have welcomed them, took it in without a word and sank back into silence.

A strange thing to see.

Every cultivator newly out of the Nanyang Sect was left more than a little dazed.

The world outside was strange enough to them already, and they had never imagined that the moment they emerged they would be fought over like this.

As though they truly did bear the aspect of dragons, with futures beyond all measure.

Zhu Jue glanced at Jiang Qiulan beside him, and found not the slightest flicker in her expression.

If anyone here felt that something was off—

it was most likely him.

Zhu Jue knew his own measure well enough. He was only a Martial Immortal, and Jiang Qiulan had not yet broken through to Spirit-Transformation.

Inside the Nanyang Sect, that was just enough to make them people of some consequence.

But outside… had they not seen the Wutong Mountain Ancestor herself standing there meek as a quail?

He could not for the life of him work out what made him worth the notice of people like that.

"……"

He waited a long while, and no answer came.

The middle-aged man of the Heaven-Sword Sect looked down at them again, his brows drawing together almost imperceptibly.

A pack of creatures who by sheer luck had got out of a place where the lineage had been severed.

The strongest of them barely reached Return-to-Void, and the rest included ordinary qi-refining cultivators. Shallow in understanding, poor in method — to be permitted to study in the inner gate was already extraordinarily generous treatment.

Were they still not satisfied?

He watched carefully for a moment, and found that nearly all of them were quietly looking toward the white-robed young man at the Spirit-Transformation realm.

Then his eye caught the robe itself, and he found he could not stand the sight…