Hongze is broad and boundless, and strange sights of every bizarre kind are scattered through it.

Emerald-Cloud Reef was no more than one perfectly ordinary spot among them; only because it lay inside Nanhong, and held no danger, did so many disciples talk about it.

There was no counting the sights stranger than this that Su Yushang had seen, so there was naturally no excitement in it for her.

But turning the thought over, it struck her as pitiable somehow that even a place of this sort was something the Blood Master — a spirit-beast of the twelfth layer of Return-to-Void — kept in her heart and longed for.

In truth, the title Blood Master was itself a piece of irony.

Never mind that the sect disciples treated her with a fair show of respect; in their eyes this was simply a demon that could supply the sect with fire-fowl blood essence.

Only that she had lived a good many years and her cultivation was very high; adding in some thought for her long toil over the years, the sect elders had relaxed a little toward her and let her walk about inside the sect. But as she was neither elder nor steward, and no few disciples pitied what had befallen her, they had given her the title of Master.

There was no knowing what had happened at the beginning, to get this Mysterious Phoenix captured by the Heaven-Sword Sect.

And to have to bear a hundred thousand years of suffering.

“So it is not as fine to look at as you imagined either?”

Su Yushang stood upon the unbroken green reef-rock; the green light poured into the water and threw itself back against the clear vault of the sky, and so there was the emerald-cloud glow.

“It is indeed not quite as I imagined.” The Mysterious Phoenix smoothed back the hair the wind had disordered at her temples, lifted her eyes quietly to the sky, and looked a little lost.

“That is perfectly normal. When I first heard them talking of the amusing things outside, my heart itched unbearably,…