The Great Zhao Dynasty had been founded only a hundred and fifty years ago.
For the first fifty years, it had hidden its claws and fangs and endured.
Over the next hundred, its wings had grown strong. From a small, remote kingdom, it had become a power entrenched like a crouching tiger and coiled dragon, sweeping across vast swathes of the Jiang Kingdom, overawing every faction, and standing as one leg of a tripod alongside the Spirit Controlling Sect, the Jiang Kingdom's former overlord. It had achieved all this through ruthless, tyrannical slaughter.
Wherever Great Zhao's heavenly armies and the Demon Suppression Bureau's Immortal Officials marched, they shattered mountains, razed temples, destroyed sects, and extinguished ancestral rites. The cultivation sects, lineages, and vassal kingdoms in their path either submitted or were executed. There was no third choice.
The Hundred Flowers Pavilion was one of the sects Great Zhao had recently crushed.
Its pavilion master, Lady Hundred Flowers, had stood at the peak of Foundation Establishment. Though it hardly ranked among the first-rate powers of the Nine Kingdoms Cultivation World, the Hundred Flowers Pavilion was a sect of female cultivators whose disciples were all beautiful as flowers and skilled in arts of seduction and dual cultivation. Their connections stretched far and wide, and even ordinary Golden Core sects had to show them some respect.
Unfortunately, they had run into the vicious dragon that was Great Zhao and been torn to shreds. Aside from Lady Hundred Flowers, who had escaped by a stroke of luck, nearly every disciple had met with disaster. They had either died on the spot or been captured and hauled back, then thrown into the Jade Green Pavilion.
Hong Yuan rubbed between his brows. The Jade Green Pavilion fell under the Demon Suppression Bureau's jurisdiction. Supposedly, some powerful