One black-backed flood-dragon general after another climbed the jade mountain, each delivering jade slips, until they were piled high on the table.

For all its size, and even with its Dragon King asleep, Xihong still had seven dragon sons, every one of them a match for the Dao-merging realm, holding the place down. And yet a woman who had come from the east held its most important channels of information.

The Dragon Consort of the jade mountain lived up to her name.

Zixian scanned the jade slips in her hands without a word, carefully picked out several, and passed them to Ji Jingxi. “Look.”

As she spoke, she sent her aura into the slips, and an image appeared in the boudoir, round as a mirror.

It showed a busy market somewhere, crowded with people coming and going.

A young man in a long green-feathered robe was strolling along, perfectly at ease. The next moment, before he could react at all, he was blasted off his feet.

While the cultivators around them stared in horror, a tall, massive figure stepped out of the crowd, wrapped entirely in a dark-gold dharma-robe. He walked unhurriedly up to the young man, raised a foot, and in no hurry at all, ground the young man's skull to pieces.

Not a word passed between the two from start to finish. There was no feud, no grudge of any kind.

In fact, just before he was blasted away, the young man had even gone out of his way to step aside for the unusually huge man.

The thick smell of blood spread through the market.

The huge man bent down a little. A rough, scale-covered claw reached out of his wide sleeve, gripped the young man by the collar and hoisted the corpse up. Without a word, he left the market.

Only when his back had vanished into the sky did the market finally erupt in a piercing scream!

“A great demon!”

The crowd scattered in every direction. The long street that had been packed a moment ago was empty in an instant.

“……” Ji Jingxi glanced…