The wind swept over the long sea, leaving no time for self-pity.
Cloud Arrival stretched ten thousand miles—when had it ever known regret?
Qi Wen, commander of the Summer Corpse Army, stood upon the deck of the Calamity warship, gazing out at the distant sky. Grim ghostly mist spread like smoke through the sea of clouds. Ji Xuanzhen cleaved Heaven Ghosts with his palm and held the four quarters firm; great masses of dark cloud—the terrifying power of the Dao Derivation level—were ceaselessly falling into the sea.
In a sense, if the King of Jin of the Jing Kingdom killed Bolu in the Near-Sea today, he would also be giving the people of Qi a grand gift.
And he would be the one to enjoy the most precious part of that gift.
After all, the death of a True Lord was of great benefit to heaven. Bolu's Dao body would be an immense boon to the Near-Sea Archipelago, and Qi Wen had already received his appointment as Great Qi Maritime Military Superintendent—the highest military commander of the Near-Sea Archipelago.
The reason this post was not more aptly named "Near-Sea Military Superintendent" was naturally to avoid touching the sensitive nerves of other states, lest they say that Qi State was claiming the Sea Frontier as its own—though that was more or less the truth, it was best not to put it that way. The Sea Frontier belonged to the Human Race as a whole; every side bore responsibility for it, and every side held authority over it.
He had indeed arrived at a good time, reaping without effort the benefits of the Middle Antiquity Heavenly Road's collapse and the Jing Kingdom's full withdrawal from the Near-Sea.
But it was also the result of his own efforts to seize opportunity.
The duties