God Empress's power was already nearing its limit, and her management of the Heavenly Court had grown increasingly lax. Over the past thousand years, many conglomerates had glimpsed the hope of turning the tables and ruling the roost.
They had accumulated sufficient strength, secretly formed interest groups, blotted out the sky with one hand, and voraciously drained their respective fields.
The Five Great Academies.
The pharmaceutical spirit-plant conglomerates.
A colossal power with an entire industrial chain.
The Artifact Spirit development Research Institute.
And...
Beyond the Red Heaven Realm, the Dao-marker legions that occupied who knew how many worlds and exploited the myriad heavens.
Somewhere in the Chaos Void, where neither time nor space had meaning, several voices projected into being and conversed across worlds.
"Zhang Ju Tan can't recover. The evidence is too damning—it directly alarmed God Empress and even implicated many others. This matter can't be allowed to end here."
Someone spoke lightly.
There was no anger or apprehension in his words, only a rational, cool-headed judgment.
"Perhaps some people overestimated themselves. They're disrupting order—the order that no one has been able to shake for thousands upon thousands of years. Can they bear the consequences? Some powers in the Red Heaven Realm have grown too old. They seem not to understand that times have changed. The ones standing at the summit now are no longer the Red Heaven Realm!"
"Whoever did it shall pay the bloody price themselves!"
Someone spoke coldly, high above all others.
"Ten Thousand Spirits provided the evidence. Supposedly, they received it suddenly and, for some unknown reason, chose to target Zhang Ju Tan. It's highly abnormal."
"Ten Thousand Spirits, the colossus of Three Palace City, is simply too far behind the times. It can no longer keep up with the age. Once, it could barely