"Hah."

Shen Yi walked slowly out of the founding ancestor's hall and took stock again of the medicinal toxins piled up inside him.

In truth he could feel them working on him every time he made a move; it was only that there had always been a heap of other rubbish in his body as well, so he had never paid it much attention.

He had not expected it to be this serious.

He leafed through the route map now lodged in his mind. From the sheer distance of it, this Baohua Sect was certainly not one of the Nanhong Seven.

It lay outside them.

Which made asking the Clear-Moon Sect for help on the matter rather awkward.

Shen Yi called out Zhang Laifu. It seemed the only help he had left now was this dog.

In a fight each of them came to no more than the fourth layer of Return-to-Void, and the dog was the sort with a wretched bloodline besides, fit only for beating things below its own realm.

Strength like that plainly did not amount to much across the whole of Nanhong.

Still, he had to go out and see for himself.

Shen Yi glanced back over his surroundings. Unless there was truly no other way, he had no wish to hand this Nanyang treasured site to anyone.

The realm it could buy him was the lesser matter; there was, after all, more than one treasured site in the world.

But the site held too many people who had helped him. To put their lives in a stranger's hands — and with the Nanyang Sect's own history standing there as a warning—

Shen Yi was not quite easy about it.

"……"

He gathered his thoughts and set off toward where the Yu clan were housed.

Over the ten-odd days of pill-refining and breaking through—

Li Qingfeng had long since got the new arrivals settled, and on Shen Yi's instruction had distributed that vast batch of moon-pearls.

The pearls were useless to a Return-to-Void cultivator, but to the qi-refining and Spirit-Transformation realms they were as good as…