What sort of stance should the Alliance fundamentally hold?
This was actually a question well worth exploring.
For the vast majority of sects, the Alliance was an entity that gathered a crowd of independent cultivators together, profited from them, and used that profit to expand its own influence.
It certainly possessed strength of its own, but the position it held today had been built entirely upon the vast numbers of independent cultivator residents piling up beneath it.
To put it in a somewhat inappropriate way, the reason the major sects did not dare strike the Alliance dead was essentially because it was borrowing the tiger's might to frighten the foxes?
Of course, that delved into deeper matters.
Returning to the Alliance's development and Heyang City's rise.
This thread was actually exceedingly clear.
Heyang City had first drawn independent cultivators together through the manufacture of Spirit Guns. Because it controlled this channel, it had also made its first round of contact with the initial group of sects.
Once that first contact had been made, everything that followed had naturally fallen into place.
More and more independent cultivators gathered here, and the Alliance's reputation grew ever greater. Its standing among the other great sects likewise rose with the tide.
Everyone was willing to trade in Heyang City. Later on, even when sects had already made contact with one another in the outer districts, they would still travel thousands of miles to this land where neither party knew the other.
What was that for?
It was because the Alliance had never before shown any shift in its own inclinations.
Perhaps some would bring up how, in its early days, after the Alliance's strength had grown, several sects had feared its potential and banded together to destroy it.
But understand this clearly: the Alliance