Who could have imagined it.

That deep in Xihong, among the rolling jade-blue waves, there should stand a soaring mountain of jade, too tall for the eye to find its summit.

The body of the mountain was clear and translucent, layer on layer, lovely with rippling light. And at the same time it held glazed pavilions in orderly ranks, one after another, with a stern sense of high and low running faintly through the arrangement.

The instant they saw that jade mountain every cultivator and every demon fell silent and formed up neatly to go forward in line.

Shen Yi glanced idly to one side, and finding that nobody was paying him any attention, gave the fingertips hidden in his sleeve a small shake. The shape-transformation art he had prepared for the express purpose of slipping into Nanhong came in useful once again.

He made no very extravagant adjustment, only altering a few details of that handsome face — a touch of the cold and raw about the brows and eyes, and a chill that seemed to hang at the corner of the mouth and would not melt away. So he had something of the look of a man best not approached.

Shen Yi was well used to changing his face, and set his expression with the ease of practice.

In an instant he had gone from a young man who looked reserved to a proud, cold, solitary rogue cultivator.

It was plain enough that this so-called birthday feast of the Dragon Consort's was laid on at no smaller a scale than the Seven-Sect Assembly had been.

Even cultivators at the three-city stage — men who in Nanhong would already hold the standing of a top immortal-sect elder like Liu Xingshan — had to queue up meekly to approach this jade mountain.

Shen Yi had done what he had done partly to prepare for whatever might come next, and partly because he had reached a new judgment about how dangerous this business was.

That Dragon Consort… or rather, somewhere inside this jade mountain, there was very likely a being holding…