At dusk the next day, a lean figure slipped quietly into the ruins of Cloud Sun City.
His name was Murong Qing. He was a scout for the Murong Lineage, responsible for carrying messages and gathering intelligence.
Three days earlier, disaster had struck Cloud Sun City. The Murong Lineage had fled in haste, hundreds of its members relocating overnight to hide on Pale Leaf Mountain, hundreds of miles away.
In the chaos, there had been no time to retrieve the treasures in the underground Martial Armory. Murong Qing had been tasked with remembering its location and returning once things settled down.
Now he stood amid the ruins, carefully checking his bearings. He soon found the buried iron door.
Delighted, he hurriedly took out the Secret Key and fitted it into the slot in the door.
The Secret Key turned, and a mechanism clicked.
The iron door slowly opened.
Murong Qing ducked inside at once and followed the familiar passage downward.
But the deeper he went, the more uneasy he became. The passage was empty. Every crate of weapons that should have been stacked along its walls had vanished.
He quickened his pace and rushed into the first stone chamber.
Empty.
The second chamber was empty too.
The third, the fourth, the fifth...
He ran through dozens of chambers. Every one was bare. Not so much as a single hair remained.
Murong Qing's legs gave way, and he collapsed to the floor.
"It's over."
"Which goddamn bastard did this... Fuck!"
The Murong Lineage's wealth, amassed over nearly a century—the weapons, pills, and Cultivation Techniques gathered through generations of painstaking effort—was gone.
He scrambled to his feet and charged out of the underground Martial Armory like a madman, disappearing into the night.
On Pale Leaf Mountain, the Murong Lineage had established