Blood Tide True Venerable's soul scattered.
Jiang Ding meticulously performed rites for her, clearing away the residual karmic order and laws before concealing himself and returning to Blood Lake Corpse Mountain.
From beginning to end, everything in this Devil Dao Sect remained as it always had been.
The disciples and elders each attended to their duties—those cultivating cultivated, those laboring labored—just as they had for the past hundred thousand years.
Occasionally, Deity Transformation Cultivators favored by their superiors would seek an audience with a Void Refinement True Venerable. Sometimes they were ignored, sometimes reprimanded, and sometimes received and given a few pointers.
Everything was exactly as before.
Not a single disciple or elder of Blood Lake Corpse Mountain knew that all of their sect's Void Refinement ancestors had now vanished without a trace. The sect was utterly hollow within, with only an illusory shell remaining.
Now, only one other sect remained.
"Nine Heavens Divine Thunder True Sect, you stole my money..."
"When we were in the Northern Plains Minor Realm, your Thunder Department Dao Soldiers attacked me. Besides, over the past hundred thousand years or so, you enslaved who knew how many Ascended Cultivators from the Lower Realm, including those who ascended from the Northern Plains. They are all my subordinates. This is entirely old hatred piled atop new grudges, not me attacking you on a whim..."
Jiang Ding muttered to himself.
He moved through Blood Lake Corpse Mountain like a ghost. The passing elders and disciples all turned a blind eye to him. Sometimes, people even passed directly through his body and walked on to the other side without making any contact at all, as though they existed on a different spatial plane.
After several dozen steps, he arrived at the forbidden grounds in the rear mountain of Blood