High-Altitude Immortal Vessel, the Saintess Heard Nothing of Mortal Affairs

High above Immortal-Breaking Mountain, within the clouds.

The gale-force winds were exceedingly violent. If an ordinary bird flew up here, its bones would be ground to powder in an instant.

A massive white jade vessel, as large as half a mountain peak, sailed steadily through the gale winds. An extremely thick, translucent barrier of formation light enveloped its exterior, blocking every deadly current of air outside. The intricate cloud patterns carved across the vessel's surface had been painstakingly filled with powdered high-grade spirit stones.

At the very top level of the giant vessel stood a luxurious three-story incense pavilion.

At the center of the pavilion sat a half-man-high violet-gold incense burner. A slender stick of incense burned within it. This was Spirit-Concentrating Dragon Saliva Incense. A single stick no longer than a finger could sell for a hundred low-grade spirit stones at the Myriad Treasures Pavilion. To commoners at the bottom of society, that money was enough to buy every life in half the outer city. Yet in this incense pavilion, it was used merely to dispel the chill of the high skies.

The Saintess of the Azure Firmament Sword Sect sat cross-legged behind layers upon layers of snow-white gauze curtains.

She wore a spotless Flowing-Cloud Dharma Robe. Her eyes were closed, her hands formed a cultivation seal, and the rhythm of her chest rising and falling had stretched exceedingly long.

Two faint knocks sounded from outside the door.

An old woman pushed open the carved wooden door and stepped lightly over the high threshold. She leaned on a cane engraved with a complete dragon-head formation, and was clearly a Core Formation expert. Outside, cultivation like hers would have been enough to make her an emperor in a place like Black Mud City.

Yet within this incense pavilion, the old woman stopped with utmost respect three steps away from the gauze curtains. She even forcibly suppressed every trace of her Core Formation spiritual energy within her dantian, afraid of disturbing the person meditating inside.

The old woman bent slightly at the waist. The tip of her dragon-head cane hovered in midair; she did not even dare let it touch the floor.

"Saintess, the disciples steering the vessel have reported that the spirit vessel is about to completely leave the borderlands of East Mystic Province."

The person behind the curtains made no sound.

The old woman paused briefly, then continued her report.

"There is one more matter." The old woman lowered her voice. "A disturbance broke out in Black Mud City's outer city last night. The city lord sent an urgent transmission talisman first thing this morning, saying that several high-ranking demon beasts went mad outside the city. Under cover of night, they smashed down more than half of the inner city's formation walls."

At those words, the Saintess behind the curtains did not even lift an eyelid.

"Such filthy matters from the lower realm are worth bringing to foul my ears?"

The Saintess's voice was crisp, yet entirely without inflection. She carried herself as though seated high above the clouds, utterly indifferent to mortal lives.

The old woman immediately lowered her head even further.

"This old servant spoke out of turn." The old woman hurriedly begged forgiveness. "That Black Mud City Lord truly is a fool who succeeds at nothing and ruins everything. The sect spent so many spirit stones supporting him, yet he could not even handle the minor matter of clearing out the lowly commoners before your Dust-Severing Rite. Now he has even made a laughingstock of himself by letting the city walls be smashed down."

The old woman's fingers tightened around her cane.

"Once we return to the sect, this old servant will personally report it to the Enforcement Hall and have him sent to Earthfire Cavern to endure three months of fire punishment."

A series of exceptionally crisp jade chimes came from behind the gauze curtains. The Saintess was fiddling with the exceedingly rare icy jade bracelet around her wrist.

"Whether he is punished is a matter for the Enforcement Hall's rules."

The Saintess's fingers stopped, rubbing an icy jade bead between her fingertips.

"My karmic ties to the mortal world have already been severed. Those mud-legged wretches in Black Mud City—whether they live or die, whether demon beasts eat them or they starve to death in the streets—have nothing to do with me anymore. Do not mention them before me again."

The enormous white jade spirit vessel continued onward. Its hull skimmed across the thick sea of clouds.

Directly below the spirit vessel lay the deep forest on the outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain. It was the very place where Lu Chen had crushed several Azure Firmament Sword Sect outer disciples to death with his bare hands last night.

The old woman glanced downward through the half-open window lattice of the incense pavilion.

Below lay nothing but wild forest blanketed year-round by black demonic miasma. Acting on the instincts of a Core Formation cultivator, the old woman casually extended her divine sense downward.

A Core Formation cultivator's divine sense was immensely powerful. In an instant, it pierced through thousands of zhang of sky and the murky miasma, sweeping directly across a marsh somewhere in the forest.

The old woman's brows suddenly knitted together.

She caught sight of several corpses through her divine sense. The bodies had already been gnawed beyond recognition by the forest beasts, but on several scraps of cloth scattered across the ground, the cloud patterns of Azure Firmament Sword Sect outer disciples could still faintly be seen.

They were the unlucky wretches whose necks Lu Chen had casually snapped last night, before demon wolves divided up their flesh.

The old woman shifted half an inch closer to the window. A thread of true essence seeped into the palm gripping her cane.

What were those outer disciples, those wastes who spent every day chasing petty gains, doing on the outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain in the middle of the night? They had probably wanted to hunt a few low-ranking demon beasts and dig out some demon cores to trade for spirit stones in the city.

In the end, their skills had fallen short, and they had become rations for those beasts instead.

The old woman withdrew her divine sense and planted her cane back on the floor.

They were only a few outer disciples with worthless lives. Dead was dead. Such trash with neither talent nor background died by the hundreds in the sect every year; it was hardly worth making a fuss over. If the spirit vessel stopped over such trifles and disturbed the Saintess's quiet cultivation, that would be the real crime.

The old woman withdrew her gaze from the window, calm returning to her eyes as she completely cast the forest below from her mind.

The morning wind on the outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain was fierce.

A gust rose from the muddy ground below, which had only just witnessed a massacre. It pierced the clouds and blew in through the half-open window of the incense pavilion.

Mixed in the wind was an exceedingly faint scent of blood, along with the rotten stench belonging to the lowest depths of Mud Alley.

The Saintess behind the gauze curtains suddenly furrowed her brow.

Undisguised revulsion instantly appeared on her breathtakingly beautiful face.

"What is that smell?"

The Saintess immediately raised her hand. Her crystalline fingertips flicked casually outward.

A stream of pure true essence shot from her fingers.

Smack.

The incense pavilion's carved wooden window slammed shut under the force of the true essence. Immediately afterward, the isolation formation outside the window fully activated. A pale blue curtain of light instantly covered the entire pavilion, completely sealing out all air from outside.

The pavilion was once more filled with costly dragon saliva incense.

The Saintess lowered her hand and changed her meditative posture behind the gauze curtains.

"Tell the disciples steering the vessel to activate the formation to its maximum. Return to the sect at full speed."

Extreme irritation seeped through the Saintess's voice.

"The foul air of this godforsaken backwater will stain my Dao heart for nothing if I breathe too much of it. If even the slightest scent from the lower realm drifts in again, have them jump off the spirit vessel themselves and feed the wild dogs."

The old woman nodded repeatedly in acknowledgment, turned, and quickly left the incense pavilion.

In less than half a breath's time.

Several enormous formation disks at the stern of the white jade vessel erupted at once. Violent spiritual energy spewed blue flames dozens of zhang long, tearing open a massive gash through the clouds.

The giant vessel suddenly accelerated. Its enormous hull left an immensely long, broad trail across the sky, then vanished completely into the deepest reaches of the cloud sea, racing toward Central Heaven Province.

Seated high above the clouds, the Saintess did not care in the slightest what was happening in the mud pit beneath her feet.

She did not know that, in the patch of forest she had just despised so much that she would not spare it a second glance, the mortal she had treated as a sacrifice for her Dust-Severing Rite—the commoner she had casually struck with a sword aura, whose name she did not even deem worth remembering—the lowly wretch who could only search foul gutters for half a moldy steamed bun—

had already pulled up the City-Guarding Stele, weighing thirty thousand jin, with his bare hands.

He had crushed apart the flying sword artifact the immortal sect took such pride in.

The Ultimate Dao Furnace ignited within that mortal's body was accumulating power with terrifying ferocity. Sooner or later, that power would smash into the gates of the Ninth Heaven and pulverize her lofty dream of immortal cultivation, along with the entire order of the immortal Dao, into a complete mess.

The scene returned to the ground.

The outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

The entrance to the cave, mostly blocked by the Dao Stele.

Lu Chen sat cross-legged beside a cool fissure in the rock, his upper body bare. The mud and grime steamed dry by his Ultimate Dao blood and qi had formed a hard shell over his iron-gray skin.

He tilted his head back, his gaze piercing through the sparse canopy overhead as he stared straight into the sky.

High above, the cloud trail torn open by the spirit vessel's currents was piercingly white.

Lu Chen said nothing. His bloodshot eyes locked tightly onto that fading streak in the clouds.

His left hand rested casually on his knee. In his wide, rough palm, he held a blackened shard of metal. It was the tip of a mid-grade flying sword he had snapped in two on the spot last night.

Lu Chen's gaze never left the sky.

The tendons in his right arm suddenly tightened.

Ultimate Dao blood and qi surged down his arm and flooded into the five fingers of his left hand in an instant.

Crack.

His palm abruptly clenched inward.

That incomparably hard remnant blade of the immortal sect was crushed between his callused fingers into a palmful of fine iron powder.

Lu Chen turned his wrist over.

The metal powder trickled through his fingers, scattering onto the rotting mud beneath his feet, soaked full of blood.