Meanwhile.
Nether Province, Subduing Dragon Temple.
Inside the council hall, the atmosphere was so heavy it seemed to have frozen solid.
The hall was immensely spacious, enough to accommodate hundreds of people for discussion. Portraits of the temple's first master hung on all four walls, emanating faint pressure—the lingering aura left behind by a Venerable Realm expert.
At the very center of the hall, an enormous stone-carved True Dragon coiled atop a high platform. Its head was held high, its eyes wide open, its whiskers flowing, its claws treading upon clouds. Its entire body had been carved from a single block of black iron jade and weighed more than ten thousand jin.
Two fist-sized luminous pearls were embedded in the True Dragon statue's eyes, casting a cold, ghostly light, as though a True Dragon were gazing down upon all living things.
Beneath the stone True Dragon sculpture stood a pitch-black stone chair.
That was the seat of Subduing Dragon Temple's master. For hundreds of years, only successive temple masters had been qualified to sit upon it.
The chair had been forged from ten-thousand-year cold iron. Nine coiled dragons were carved into its backrest, and each dragon's eyes were set with a dark-red gemstone that flickered with eerie light in the dim hall.
At that moment, a gaunt old man sat upon the stone chair. He wore a black Daoist robe, his hair was streaked with white, and his face was as wrinkled as dried tangerine peel. Yet his eyes resembled two ancient, unfathomable wells.
This man was Jiang Changkong, the master of Subduing Dragon Temple. He had reached the peak of the Sixth Layer of the Great Grandmaster Realm's Yang Spirit stage and stood only one step away from the Seventh Layer of the Great Grandmaster Realm, the Heavenly Human