"Senior Fang Chen?"
The voice was quiet, yet it was like a giant stone hurled into a still lake. Ripples spread swiftly across the entire square.
More eyes turned toward him. A Jade Slip slipped from someone's hand and hit the ground with a snap. Others sprang up from their crouches. Some hurried over, only to stop several steps away, as though they dared not believe what they were seeing.
"It really is Senior Fang Chen!"
A middle-aged man's voice trembled with excitement he could not contain. "He's back! Senior Fang Chen is back!"
The news swept through the square like wildfire caught by the wind, passing from mouth to ear, from one bamboo house to the next.
In moments, the entire settlement of the Absolute Heaven Realm stirred like a pond flooded with fresh water.
Fang Chen stood at the edge of the square, his gaze passing over the faces surging toward him.
Some of those faces he knew. Others he did not.
The familiar faces were alight with excitement bordering on abandon, while curiosity and reverence mingled in the eyes of the strangers.
Just as the crowd was about to reach Fang Chen—
"Make way! Move!"
A clear voice rang out from behind the crowd, urgent and almost imperious.
The crowd parted as if an invisible hand had pushed through its center, retreating to either side to reveal a narrow path.
A figure burst through it, moving like a Silver-White bolt of lightning across the square's flagstones.
He skidded to a stop before Fang Chen, the gust in his wake whipping grass and dust aside.
He was a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, tall and slender, dressed in a Silver-White robe embroidered with fine silver patterns that gleamed softly beneath the milky light of the sky.
His