Liuyun's Chess Piece

Zhushan Road.

To the north lay the mountain ranges separating the Northern Kingdom from Central Province. These mountains stretched for thousands of kilometers, all the way to the Cloud Sea Grassland. From afar, they seemed to reach straight into the heavens, and so folk legends claimed that this place held the Heaven-Connecting Stairway of the immortals.

To the west stood the icy mountains of the Snow Region, their peaks likewise soaring into the clouds. Mortals could not see their summits at all. These ice mountains were sacred ground to the people of the Snow Region, and every year, tens of thousands of believers made the long journey to their feet to behold the grandeur of the holy land.

Between the Snow Region's icy mountains and the northern ranges ran a long, narrow valley that led directly to the nearly uninhabited North Sea. This region had been called North Sea Prefecture since the Xia Dynasty. Though it was nominally an administrative region under the Central Province regime, it had in fact remained autonomous year-round, with its own militia and small fleet.

The mountains on both sides of North Sea Prefecture attracted many sects to establish Daoist temples there. This was especially true of smaller sects that favored seclusion, ensuring that tales were always passed down from the mountain ranges. Over time, the place became ever more mysterious in the hearts of the local people.

Among them, the Earth Cave Sect had operated here the longest. Aside from the outer mountain ranges, nearly all the great mountains closer to the Northern Kingdom had been hollowed out by the Earth Cave Sect. There were tens of thousands of disciples cultivating within, including over a thousand Immortal Realm cultivators. They had built more than a dozen cities across the valley's green lands, and the