In the pitch-black night, Luo Bei, Tong Bugu, and Nalan Ruoxue stood quietly in a wilderness less than five hundred li from Emei.
Suddenly, a flash of azure light flickered in the sky not far ahead of them. It was as though a tear had abruptly split open, and a large ship several zhang long appeared in an instant.
The great ship was entirely azure, pointed at both ends like an enormous shuttle. Its surface was smooth, without a single pattern, and its radiance seemed to flow beneath the surface, hidden without revealing itself.
This magic treasure was Emei's Cloud Meng Divine Shuttle.
Before the battle at Emei's Golden Summit four hundred years ago, Emei had always been the greatest sect in the world. Had it not been for that battle against the Netherworld Blood Demon, in which Emei lost far too many masters, the position of leader of the world's Orthodox Xuanmen would never have fallen to Kunlun today.
During the war in which the Netherworld Blood Demon swept across the world, the entire cultivation world suffered grievous losses. Many sects were wiped out outright, while many formidable cultivation arts and magic treasures were lost or vanished without trace. Thus, compared with that era, the present cultivation world was in fact vastly inferior. Though the number of cultivators might not be less than it had been four hundred years ago, in terms of average cultivation, the number of cultivators above late Golden Core Realm, and the flourishing profusion of all kinds of cultivation arts, it was already far behind what it had been four centuries before.
Four hundred years ago, medium-sized major sects like Qingcheng and Kongtong each had at least six or seven Nascent Soul Realm cultivators. Four hundred years later, Qingcheng and Kongtong were still considered medium-sized