"..."
Ten million miles away.
Pingyang City, capital of the Great Wei Dynasty.
This enormous city, occupying the finest surviving spiritual vein on the Central Continent, was now steeped in an almost frenzied prosperity.
The entire Imperial City was festooned with lanterns and decorations. Formations powered by spirit stones wove a skyful of dazzling colors through the night.
Deep within the palace, the music of strings and pipes filled Tai Chi Hall without pause.
Wei Wuji, emperor of the Great Wei Dynasty and a supreme expert at the early stage of the fourteenth realm, sat upon a dragon throne carved from a single piece of thousand-year-old warm jade.
He held a blood-jade wine cup, his eyes fixed on the dozens of beautiful demon cultivators dancing gracefully in the center of the hall. Uncontainable excitement filled his face.
Wei Wuji's heart was racing.
The two supreme elders, Zhao Wuji and Wang Chongshan, had already taken their men to that barren mountain.
According to intelligence the scouts had risked their lives to send back, the mysterious martial artist who had beaten a fifteenth-realm Demon Sovereign to death in the heart of the wasteland was on that mountain.
The report had been perfectly clear: the woman had a head full of white hair and sat slumped before two graves in the wilderness, without even the slightest fluctuation of true qi around her.
Wei Wuji knew all too well what that meant.
To kill someone in the fifteenth realm required terrifying power that defied the laws of heaven.
Such power could never have come from nothing. She must have paid an unimaginably devastating price.
Mutual destruction, or a lamp burned dry of oil.
That was the only conclusion Wei Wuji had reached after countless deductions.
*"As long as we get ahead of the other