Of the four Hongs, only Donghong had never known strife.

The purple-whiskered white dragons had no love of killing, and on top of that their strength was so formidable that no other power ever thought of challenging them.

It was said that the East Dragon King had left Hongze in his youth to travel the Divine Land, and that his nature was unlike that of the other Dragon Kings. Over “the East Dragon King,” he much preferred to be called Perfected Master Zixuan.

A Dao Realm dragon, a great demon who truly stood at the very peak of Hongze!

At that moment, in the Dragon Palace of Donghong—

A middle-aged man wore a plain green robe without a single ornament. His graying hair was pinned up with a stick of purple bamboo.

The great hall was unlike any other Dragon Palace's hall too. There were no long stairs and no throne, only identical clean desks set out in neat rows, like a schoolroom.

The middle-aged man sat behind one of them.

He looked less like a Dragon King famous throughout Hongze than a schoolteacher.

Perfected Master Zixuan looked silently at the two dragon seals on his desk.

On the other side of the desk, Crown Prince Ziyang, who had hurried back, poured himself tea while describing what he'd seen and heard on his trip west.

“Royal Father, you really should meet him. He's no ordinary man—like some immortal reborn.”

“Of course I'll meet him.”

Memories rose in Perfected Master Zixuan's eyes. He trusted his son's judgment, and he trusted the Nanyang Sect too.

The people who came out of that place—Jiaoyang, Xuanqing—might have plenty of flaws in their natures, but they had one thing in common: they were good people.

Xuanqing was still alive. If that young man surnamed Shen had won his approval and become the Nanyang Sect Master, he had to be like them. He couldn't be all that bad.

It was only that the older generation, his own among them, had failed. They hadn't made Hongze a world of peace; they'd let it become this ghastly mess,…