The demon races deserved their name as creatures favored by heaven and earth.

Set against cultivators, who from the qi-refining realm onward needed every kind of method and treasure-tool to lean on, and treasure materials to condense their Dao-pillars, and who had then to cross a heavenly kalpa that might leave them dead with their Dao extinguished—

A realm reached only after so much bitter labor, and only after finding a Dao-merging treasured site on top of that. Whereas for the demon races, so long as the bloodline was strong enough and there was food and drink enough, a long enough span of years would bring them strength of the same order, as water comes to a channel.

Among the demon races Shen Yi had met, at least, the small demons who could not be sure of tomorrow did not count. And those with any strength at all who were still willing to learn some art came only to the Spider Empress and Ke the Thirteenth and a scarce few others.

And in that state of things, An Yi, who might be said never to have learned anything, had shattered the Ten Thousand Forms Pavilion Sect Master's body by instinctive pounding alone.

Yet the reason the Dao-merging realm was called a small heaven and earth was that they had truly gone beyond the bounds of the mortal.

The Ten Thousand Forms Pavilion Sect Master's shattered body turned into threads of blue smoke and melted into the sky above, and the drifting cloud and mist seemed actually to become a face that stretched out of sight.

He glared, looking down at what lay below with his resentment surging to the heavens, and then opened his mouth.

As though he would draw this whole heaven and earth into it.

Inside the Ten Thousand Forms treasured site, out in the mortal world far from the immortal sect, there were places the company could not see. There, cultivators of famous name, royal kin and relatives by marriage, and the ordinary people in the streets alike all saw the change in the sky at that…