A year later, Zhou Yang rode the Golden Winged Thunder Roc, bringing Liu Yunxiang and several Golden Core female cultivators from Suyun Sect who had come to watch the battle, and arrived outside the Nine Yang Sect's mountain gate as scheduled.
The Nine Yang Sect's mountain gate was located within one of the great perilous lands of the Cultivation World of the Flowing Cloud Continent, the "Tianyang Rift Valley."
This "Tianyang Rift Valley" was in fact a volcanic fault zone. Within a radius of tens of thousands of miles, all manner of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occurred as frequently as everyday meals.
Yet the Nine Yang Sect's founding patriarch had possessed grand vision and great daring. He treated this place's treacherous environment as the mountain gate's natural defense, as well as a trial for the sect's disciples, and forcefully established the mountain gate atop a spirit mountain in the rift valley's central region.
Over the past ten thousand years, the Nine Yang Sect had continued without interruption, its power steadily growing, undoubtedly proving that its founding patriarch's decision had been correct.
Of course, even with such a shining precedent before them, few later generations dared follow suit.
After all, no one knew whether some day a super earthquake might suddenly erupt within the Tianyang Rift Valley, splitting apart and burying the Nine Yang Sect's mountain gate outright.
By now, word of Zhou Yang challenging the Nine Yang Sect's Great Elder, True Person Fengyang, had spread throughout the circles of high-level cultivators. Many Nascent Soul Stage cultivators and Golden Core Cultivators who could come to watch the excitement had gathered around the Tianyang Rift Valley to wait.
When Zhou Yang arrived here atop the Golden Winged Thunder Roc, he immediately sensed gazes coming from all directions.
The owners of those gazes