But that worked on others, not on Tang Changsheng. Without so much as a movement, a layer of Wishfire lit up around him, enveloping him completely and hiding every trace of what lay beneath.
Faintly, he seemed to hear a woman cry out, "Divine Power!"
"Who are you? Why have you entered our Stone Screen Tribal Stockade? Leave at once! We have a Territory Lord protecting us..."
A man who looked like their leader, perhaps the stockade chief, shouted in halting Central Land speech. Still, his accent was far closer to the real thing than that of the other tribespeople.
"A Territory Lord? Is this Imperial Court territory?"
"Yes. Lord Marquis Wu granted it to us... We pay taxes to Lord Marquis Wu every year..."
They truly were Assimilated Barbarians!
Tang Changsheng sighed softly. Neither the Imperial Court nor the Immortal Sects of the Central Land recognized so-called ancestral spirits and totems.
Whenever the people of a tribal stockade submitted to the Imperial Court, their god would be invested as a Territory Lord, roughly equivalent to the local earth god or City God of a township. Such titles were rarely bestowed on demons, only on ancestral spirits.
By this means, many tribal stockades had broken away from the Southern Borderlands and placed themselves under Imperial Court rule.
This place, it seemed, was no different!
Since it had a formally invested Territory Lord, its deity had official recognition from the Imperial Court.
The Azure Sea True Void Palace could strike without a second thought and wipe out every deity of the Divine Way in Wu Hou State, whether formally invested or not.
But Tang Changsheng had neither power that formidable nor backing that strong. He could not simply kill an officially invested deity...
So he took a step back and spread