The Clear-Moon Sect. Inside the bamboo house.

Elder Liu sat behind his desk, turning the pages with care.

As cultivation realms went, the White Jade Capital stage was one that left a man with mixed feelings.

They had already walked cultivation to its end.

A vast lifespan with nowhere to spend it, and nothing to do but sit idle and wait for a chance.

One step further and you were an immortal.

But that step might never be taken at all — not even by the day you fell.

And so Liu Shiqian preferred books to jade slips for passing the time.

Just then footsteps came from beyond the door.

He closed the book and raised his eyes.

The newcomer was another old man in an elder's robe, crane-haired and youthful-faced, his bearing rather younger than that of Liu Shiqian, who looked middle-aged.

"An elder of another sect just sent me word. Care to hear it?" Elder Chiyang came over to the desk and sat down.

The two were friends of many years, and stood on little ceremony.

He spoke without preamble. "It concerns the Nanyang treasured site. I hear you've been rather looking after that little lot lately."

At that, Liu Shiqian withdrew his gaze. "Not interested."

"What's the good of being this stubborn?"

Chiyang shook his head helplessly and said mildly, "This has to come to some conclusion, and you know it. Counting elders and personally transmitted disciples together — even at only ten or twenty to a sect — the Nanhong Seven come to a full hundred White Jade Capital cultivators between them, near enough."

"Every one of them, you and I included, is waiting for a treasured site."

"Now at last there is one, and you insist on pretending you can't see it. Aren't you afraid your Dao-heart will break?"

None of Chiyang's reasonableness moved Liu Shiqian; if anything his expression grew calmer still. "It is reaching out a hand that would break my Dao-heart."

"Ha."

Chiyang laughed aloud at last. "I knew you'd say that. It's why I came to talk to you."

He put…