But how could the Azure Elixir Sect have won?
It made no sense! There had been four late transforming force realm experts among those besieging the Azure Elixir Sect this time!
Yet if the Ten Thousand Treasures Ancestor and Blackstone Valley's army had succeeded, the Azure Elixir Sect would have been too overwhelmed to fend for itself, its destruction imminent. Its disciples would barely have had time to flee. How could they possibly have appeared in Azure Cloud Commandery and launched such a vicious assault on their Ten Thousand Treasures Commerce outpost?
The Chief Steward, Granny Qian, and the others had no time to ponder the reasons. Hurried, heavy footsteps were already coming from the stairs. The Azure Elixir Sect disciples were searching their way upstairs, and they were not far from the meeting hall where the group was gathered.
If those Azure Elixir Sect disciples caught them, they would most likely be bound and loaded onto that freight wagon too.
"This is bad! Hurry, go!" The Commandery City Chief Steward lowered his voice, which was trembling.
None of them dared hesitate. They quickly lifted a concealed stone slab in a corner of the meeting hall, revealing the dark, narrow entrance to a secret passage.
The Chief Steward, Granny Qian, and the others bent down and squeezed into the passage, enduring their discomfort as they hurried through the darkness by touch.
Only after nearly two hours of arduous crawling did they quietly emerge from beneath a pile of rubble on a secluded, barren slope outside the city.
They strained to clear the rubble piled over the opening, then laboriously squeezed out of the low entrance one by one, pushed by those behind and pulled by those ahead.
The instant they reached the fresh air outside, all of them began gasping