The Nanhong waters and lands; the immortal sects of the Seven.

There was a distinct sense just now of wind and rain gathering, and the walls about to come down.

A demon at the eighth layer of Return-to-Void held no more than a vanguard officer's place in the Dragon Palace, and yet had now drawn the attention of a great many White Jade Capital cultivators.

They sat quietly in their cave-dwellings.

Their thoughts drifting slowly.

That heart for cultivation, still for who knew how many years, had begun to stir faintly again.

Behind every one of those seated figures lay a past that would leave a man staring, and the fame of prodigies sung endlessly in the mouths of disciples.

But beneath the empty names were Dao-hearts that had waited barren for ten thousand years, long since past enduring it.

"……"

A white robe worked with gold thread swept across the sky, and before it had even come down onto the Cloud-Soaring reliefs.

Wei Yuanzhou felt spiritual senses thick as a swarm settling over him, the malice in them barely veiled.

His face turned cold, and he looked slowly back at them.

In the instant the spiritual senses touched, nine parts in ten of those spying eyes were gone at once.

What remained held far less malice, and carried no more than a little curiosity.

Wei Yuanzhou stepped quietly into the light-curtain.

In the instant his figure vanished, low voices rose at once inside Dao token after Dao token, every one of them complaining to somebody trusted.

"So he alone is the good man, and the rest of us are the wicked."

"Without hardship, how is anyone to see whether that Sect Master Shen is fit to hold a treasured site?"

"Is Senior Brother Yuanzhou trying to pamper Shen Yi into a second Senior Xuanqing?"

"He has not even inherited the Cloud-Soaring treasured site and already takes himself for Sect Master. Absurd. He may as well govern all seven sects at once, and the Nanhong Seven can take the surname Wei from now on!"

Plainly these cultivators were bitterly disappointed…