The fervent discussion about True Person Jiukong and Wisdom Gu had yet to die down, and fragments of conversation streamed endlessly into Zhou Feng's ears.
After hearing enough, he pieced together more hidden details of tonight's upheaval from the scattered chatter.
This great chaos sweeping across all of Nine Void Mountain was not a spontaneous melee between various forces at all, but a world-shaking disturbance that had long been planned, coordinated from within and without.
The simultaneous attacks on major core treasure vaults, the Scripture Repository, and resource strongholds appeared to be the joint mischief of Rogue Cultivators and outside forces, but beneath the surface lay covert struggles among the major factions.
With disorder breaking out everywhere tonight, everyone was fishing in troubled waters. Quite a few long-established factions entrenched in Nine Void Mountain had used the cover of the chaos to purge their dissidents.
Especially the two factions that had long been locked in a bitter struggle. Seizing the perfect opportunity presented by the region-wide chaos, they had secretly launched assassinations, silently eliminating large numbers of the other side's young geniuses and core cultivators.
On the surface, it was an invasion by foreign enemies. In the shadows, it was factional slaughter, using chaos to establish their might.
Among all the forces that had suffered losses, the Qian Clan's losses were said to be the most severe.
"Strange, isn't it? Every major Aristocratic Clan suffered casualties tonight, but the Qian Household alone got hit the hardest!"
"Exactly. Every one of the Qian Household's outer treasuries and resource points was attacked. More than half of the cultivators stationed there were killed or injured, while countless stores of Gu materials and Spiritual Molts were looted. They were gravely weakened."
"I heard the Qian Household withdrew all its main forces into the Tribal