Now that it had come to this, not fighting was no longer an option.
"Yuan Junzai."
The man in green spat out his name through clenched teeth. Yuan Junzai now deeply hated An Jing's vicious tongue. He had thought that coming here under orders from his family and superiors to test An Jing would be an utterly ordinary assignment. There might be some grudges formed, but at most they would trade barbs and bring out the powers behind them to test each other. How had An Jing turned official business into a feud that demanded Battle Technique with just a few words?
What he did not know was that the Immortal Dao cherished life. Everyone harbored hopes of eternal life and escaping tribulations, and all their plans and deliberations were designed around the foundation of "I will live for several thousand more years." Thus, everyone was cautious, terrified of making some mistake or forming some enmity that would leave them worrying over it for centuries, perhaps nearly a millennium, to come. For this reason, the society of the Immortal Dao was always conciliatory and smooth. Even probing struggles were mostly carefully planned, with chess pieces used to play the game.
But Martial Dao practitioners had only a single lifetime of a few hundred or thousand years. Even those in the Lingxiao Realm barely had a lifespan of ten thousand years. The vast majority of Lingxiao Realm cultivators—or rather, the vast majority of martial artists—would never reach their natural limits. They would perish long before then.
The culture of the Martial Dao world, put plainly, was one of "knowing that you will inevitably die." After death, what grudges, what calamities, what upheavals of heaven and earth, what turmoil in the realm—none of it mattered. What reputation before or after death, what