Startling News

"Defeated?!"

Before the great hall, True Lord Zhuxi trembled slightly, staggered two steps, and fell to the ground with a thud.

His protective astral energy held up his body, smashing a huge crater into the threshold, while he only felt dizzy and disoriented, the world spinning around him as though stars were flickering in the night.

"How could we have lost?!"

Zhuxi climbed to his feet stiffly. Even his cultivation as a Great True Lord could not steady him. Clutching the jade slip battle report in one hand, he suspected that the Taiyi Sect had fabricated it to shake his sect's morale. Yet only he, the sect master, knew the contact codes within it, and it even contained imprints of his fellow sect Nascent Soul cultivators' divine senses.

Even a forgery could not have been made this convincingly.

How was this fake? It was plainly real.

"Did we truly lose?" Zhuxi murmured as he walked out of the great hall and looked up. The sunlight gradually blurred, making it impossible to keep his eyes open. How he wished this was not real, that it was merely a joke from the First Elder. Yet as he gripped that jade slip, his mind was left utterly blank.

"Summon the elders to the main hall."

Silence.

Cold desolation.

The three Nascent Soul cultivators all lowered their heads.

Zhuxi closed his eyes and rubbed his brow hard.

He could no longer imagine what had gone wrong to bring about this defeat. There was no need to think about why they had lost now; it was already a foregone conclusion. If it had been a minor defeat or a bitter victory, Zhuxi would have felt they could continue to maneuver.

As long as they preserved their living strength, with the Five Domains at their