This summoning had succeeded as he had wished. If anything, it had succeeded too well: not only had it summoned a true manifestation of "Chen Ping'an," it had brought the real man himself.
Shen Zhang murmured, "It really is you, Chen Ping'an."
First came shock, then despair, then a surge of wild excitement. At last, Shen Zhang regained his composure and smiled. "So it was you after all, Chen Ping'an."
Even with the outcome settled, Shen Zhang refused to speak to Chen Ping'an from his knees. He stood up alongside Lu Zhu. In all his dealings with the world, he had never been willing to look up at anyone.
Shen Zhang's brand-new golden body now resembled an old porcelain vessel riddled with fine cracks, teetering on the brink of collapse.
For a "lesser god" to welcome the "supreme one" was an act of staggering presumption. Shen Zhang had burned his own divinity like a stick of incense, as though casting a letter into a stove fire. Soon, it would be nothing but ash.
The Confucian Sage stationed at one part of Treasure Bottle Continent's Sky Curtain reached out a giant hand and parted the clouds.
Chen Ping'an said something to him. He nodded, but did not descend upon the battlefield ruins.
Some powerful cultivators of the continent, close enough to have the first glimpse, also noticed something amiss here. Qi Zhen of the Divine Creation Sect, the School of Military Patriarch of Wind and Snow Temple, and the head of the Yunlin Jiang clan each deployed their most secret means to investigate, only for the Confucian Sage to veil the scene from them.
Shen Zhang looked around and sighed. "I could only summon half a true manifestation. A flaw in an otherwise beautiful thing."
Perhaps Chen Ping'an knew Shen Zhang's