Setting Out

Great Wilderness, Azure Wind Domain, Sumu City.

To the west of the city stood a sprawling cluster of dark-red buildings. This was the marketplace of the Sacred Blood Realm.

It ranked twenty-second from the bottom on the total merit leaderboard.

It was just barely above the kill line, a place where they could barely catch their breath.

Deep within the marketplace, inside a towering blood-colored stone tower.

This was the Intelligence Division of the Sacred Blood Realm's high council.

The great hall was dimly lit.

An intelligence officer dressed in a dark-red robe strode quickly into the hall and dropped to one knee.

"My lord."

In the shadows at the far end of the hall sat a burly man.

"Speak."

"News has come back from the lower realm." The intelligence officer swallowed. "The Devouring Spirit Broodmother in the Nine Provinces Small World... has fallen."

"Fallen?" A trace of surprise entered the man's voice.

"Yes. Not only was the broodmother destroyed, but the gray mist sealing off the world barrier has completely dispersed as well."

The man fell silent for a moment, then suddenly laughed.

"Interesting."

An upper-grade Profound-rank broodmother had actually been turned around and defeated.

"Has some remarkable talent emerged in Nine Provinces recently?" the man asked casually.

The intelligence officer hurriedly opened the jade slip in his hand.

"We found him."

"He is a native named Lu Zhen. Thirty-one years old. He opened the Inner Landscape path and reached the Spirit Fusion Realm."

"Apparently, he was the one who destroyed the broodmother."

After hearing this, the man shook his head, his tone cold.

"Thirty-one, Inner Landscape Spirit Fusion."

"In that backwater, he counts as a genius."

"But in the Great Wilderness... he is merely average."

There were plenty of Spirit Fusion cultivators in their early thirties within the