Above Cloud City, Phoenix Flower Lanterns filled the sky.
The sky was awash in color, Daoist Arts weaving dreams.
At this time every year, disciples of the High Heaven Pavilion would leave the High Heaven Secret Realm and tour the cities of the Cloud Kingdom. While maintaining public order, they also displayed their influence.
The Cloud Kingdom Joint Council handled this nation's daily governance, and every city and peak had Retainers who were transcendent cultivators.
Though all the great powers under heaven regarded the Cloud Kingdom as the High Heaven Pavilion's private possession, the High Heaven Pavilion itself rarely made an appearance. Situated in a great commercial city where all under heaven converged, it nevertheless carried the air of a hermit hidden away from the world—truly, the greatest recluse hides in the marketplace. This, too, was necessary for maintaining neutrality.
Any power that enjoyed expanding its influence across the world could not avoid friction with other forces, and neutrality would be out of the question.
The High Heaven Pavilion was the heart of the Cloud Kingdom, and Ye Lingxiao himself was a man of clear loves and hates, with quite a temper.
Yet the High Heaven Pavilion almost never interfered with the Cloud Kingdom's national policies. There existed between them a strange symbiotic relationship unlike that of any other nation or faction in the world.
For instance, everyone knew that Ye Lingxiao and Han Yin, the former ruler of the Yong Kingdom, were thoroughly at odds. He had known Du Ruhui, State Chancellor of the Zhuang Kingdom, in his earlier years, but later they had grown quite distant as well. Yet the Cloud Kingdom had never done anything against either nation; on the contrary, trade routes remained unbroken.
Even at the crucial juncture of the Zhuang-Yong war, when Han Yin