Zeng Shukong had come raging in.
In less than a single day, he had inflicted devastating losses on Cloudpool Cliff and Qingtian County below the mountain.
Yet this storm of demonic calamity...
Had departed as swiftly as it came.
Only last night, it had unleashed chaos, its savage might towering to the heavens. Today, the returning Daoist Master Jiang had quelled it.
And beyond the Old Mysterious Mountain Dao Lord's descent into demonic madness and the heavy casualties he had caused...
There was another matter with even greater implications.
Jiang Jingnian, the prodigy who had climbed up from the bottom, had become a Grandmaster.
In fact, as Jiang Jingnian purged the sect, suppressed demonic disasters, and resisted the foreigners over the past weeks, many sect members had already realized that the Acting Dao Lord's eventual entry onto the grandmaster path was only a matter of time.
Seven or eight years at most, three to five at least.
By then, Daoist Master Jiang, at twenty-six or twenty-seven, would surely stand among the foremost figures in the province.
Yet no one, however hard they racked their brains, could have imagined this.
Daoist Master Jiang had not waited seven or eight years, or even three.
Barely half a month after becoming Acting Dao Lord, he had stepped onto the grandmaster path.
And he had slain the Old Mysterious Mountain Dao Lord, who had succumbed to cultivation deviation.
Such strength and accomplishments...
Were nothing like what a newly ascended Grandmaster should have been capable of.
On this point...
The hall masters and deputy hall masters at the half-step grandmaster level felt it most keenly.
After all, most people in the sect...
Those martial master disciples, apprentices, and even servants had no firsthand understanding of the differences in strength between Grandmasters. Their own strength and