“We understand.”

As Shen Yi cupped his hands to them, Ji Jingxi suddenly saw the tension hidden in his eyes.

She reached out and caught hold of Ye Jiu, who still wanted to run back in with his sword.

This was the first time the Nanyang Sect Master had chosen to trust them. So, by the same token, they ought to trust him.

Trust that he could, alone, wipe out the entire West Dragon Palace right on top of its Dragon Lair!

“Tonight, not one water-kin will leave these waters alive.”

Ji Jingxi made the vow to the young man in the ink-dark robe on behalf of her two senior brothers.

Then she turned and was gone in a wash of moonlight.

Ye Jiu and Qi Yansheng stood there a moment, then looked at each other and sighed softly. They turned into streaks of light and shot off in opposite directions.

Nanyang had issued its decree. How could the seven sects not obey!

Meanwhile, on the other side, two others were slowly coming back to themselves.

“Didn't he only just get that formation chart?”

Crown Prince Ziyang looked gravely at the peach blossom overhead. The dark water was like a deep night sky, lit now by countless stars. The whole great formation was seamless, as if it had been made by heaven itself; there wasn't a flaw to find in it.

To put it bluntly, even if the Boundless Dao-Sovereign Sect's seventeen sect masters had come to lay it in person, they might not have managed anything this perfectly unified.

“Maybe he really is some old ghost of the Boundless Dao-Sovereign Sect, reborn?”

“Pushed out, framed and hounded to death, so he decided to live his life over and come back for revenge…”

Zixian murmured to herself, having already dreamed up a whole drama of grudges and revenge.

It took a look from her brother, the kind you'd give an idiot, before she sheepishly dropped the thought. Fair enough. The cultivators of the Boundless Dao-Sovereign Sect were such lapdogs they'd have carved Hongze's Great Immortal onto their foreheads if they…