A Storm Stirred by Butterfly Wings

During a city's rise, everything connected to it developed at breakneck speed.

But once the population grew, the difficulty of maintaining order rose by multiples.

Especially when an old order had been shattered and a new one had yet to be born, chaos reached its peak.

Heyang City's Lower District had recently fallen into exactly such a state.

The major incident at Myriad Clouds Sect in Northern Province some time ago had far-reaching consequences. Spirit Guns developed exclusively by the Alliance had somehow leaked out. Although Ye Xiu's timely remedy convinced the major sects that an insider was responsible, someone still had to be pushed out to take the blame.

Zhou Zhengyun, who oversaw logistics exports, was the most suitable candidate, and so he was neatly hauled out into the open.

When a special task force formed from personnel sent by the various sects, led by the Alliance's own elite cultivators, surrounded Zhou Zhengyun's home and opened the tunnel within, everyone was so stunned by the vast fortune hoarded inside that their jaws nearly hit the floor.

It was difficult to imagine that a middle-aged cultivator at merely the Core Formation realm, who spent at least four hours a day steadily working in the Alliance's Gun Foundry, could have accumulated such a mountain of wealth.

The cultivators from the major sects exchanged glances, each reading the same shock in the others' eyes.

No, I thought the gifts I'd sent made me enough of a sucker. Who would've thought everyone else was an even bigger sucker than me?

Who knew how many of the mountain-like gifts had been personally delivered by them? Now they had to personally haul them back out again. Unfortunately, getting them back into their own hands would not be so easy.

Joint investigations were hardly an isolated