Shff—

The corpses of the two White Jade Capital great demons that had just fallen were still warm when they turned into a river of blood and poured into the space between Shen Yi's brows.

His ink-black robe furled and swirled as two streaks of spirit-light shot out ahead of him, revealing two tall, powerfully built forms.

Flanked by the two Anchor-Stones—

Shen Yi rose slowly to his feet and looked at the crimson mark on his palm, spirit-light crawling across it.

Even after rummaging through the treasure pearl Sect Master Qin had left behind, he had found no way to scatter that blood rune completely.

Perhaps, for an immortal-sect cultivator, once you dared kill dragon-kin there was no longer any reason to hide it.

Still, Shen Yi had found one small trick.

It could carry the blood rune's aura off somewhere else, and mislead the Dragon Palace that way.

As for the price — a paltry few hundred or thousand years of demon lifespan, no more than that.

Shen Yi raised his eyes to the panel in front of him.

Even with the temperament he had now, his breath came a little faster.

First, in his two earlier strikes, he had cut down better than four hundred of the Dragon Palace's crack troops and fierce officers in passing; later, while hunting the other White Jade Capital great demon generals, he had walked right in on them gathering the finest experts of every clan for a council. That gave less lifespan than killing demon soldiers, but it made condensing Anchor-Stones far easier.

The trouble was how much noise he had made doing it.

Word of it reached the two great demon generals who had come late, and they split at once and fled by separate roads, each alone. Shen Yi forced a kill on one of them, and in the end chased the other into a stretch of water that felt profoundly wrong.

It took the warnings of his many water-kin Anchor-Stones before he understood that it was the fief of the Crown Prince of the South Dragon Palace, and…