"You'd best put away any thoughts of scheming against Great Hua Mountain, and soon."
Du Lianzi looked at the great temple outside the city, now reduced to ruins, and at the beam of light that had shattered the void to open a passage Beyond the Mundane. His eyelids twitched as he spoke from the heart.
"I doubt that'll be easy," Qianxi said. "Senior Brother Qiexinzi has grand ambitions. He wants to restore Kunlun's prestige and return to the days thirty years ago, when Kunlun stood alone above all others..."
"Senior Brother has grown a little obsessed. Plenty of our fellow disciples have tried to advise him, openly and otherwise," Du Lianzi said, shaking his head. "Go back forty years, and the Fortune Virtue Sect of Mount Zhongnan was no less powerful than Kunlun. It even drew a great many sects to its side in Hebei and Shandong, looking for all the world like the leader of an alliance. Only after that incident forced it to move its headquarters to Guanzhong did the alliance fall apart, leaving Kunlun truly unrivaled. That lasted only twenty or thirty years. Now Taihua is rising again. Its foundations may look thin, but one Master Soaring is worth a thousand troops! Senior Brother is simply too fixated on it. As I see it, so long as our legacy survives, that's enough. What are a few hollow honors worth?"
"..."
Qianxi listened to her Senior Brother speak as though he had seen through the ways of the world, and found herself at a loss for words.
After all, Du Lianzi had been Sect Leader Qiexinzi's confidant. Both men were regarded as hard-liners within the sect. They advocated Kunlun's supremacy over the Eight Sects and had even declared openly at an elders' council that Kunlun should stop cultivating