Li Ling stood silently facing the window, hands behind his back, his body casting a long shadow in the moonlight.
"Old Ancestor..."
Zhan Li and the others stood behind him, reporting the battle news from the East Sea.
"Corpse Kun Lord Xin Yue planned this massacre of the Heavenly Court's main force. Several disciples of our sect, including Grand-uncle Master Luo, along with members of the East Sea Immortal Alliance and the Heavenly Court's hundred-thousand-strong army, were wiped out in a single stroke. Only a lucky few escaped.
"The severity of this defeat was almost unprecedented since the Heavenly Court's founding. Even the Desolate Baleful Heavenly Lord, one of the Eight Divisions of Orthodox Gods, fell there.
"The East Sea has now fallen completely under the Netherworld Sect's control. No new reports have come back, but according to the survivors, most of the dead souls were eaten by the Corpse Kun. The few with stronger minds and spirit souls had their souls extracted by the Netherworld Sect, as is its usual practice, and were imprisoned in the Underworld as new ghosts.
"Grand-uncle Master Luo Dao has probably... probably met his end."
"I understand..." Li Ling sighed softly, a trace of desolation in his voice.
The Netherworld Sect's move had indeed caught him off guard.
Great cultivators ordinarily possessed clear, penetrating intuition, capable of sensing danger like cicadas sensing autumn before its winds stirred. They could more or less perceive crises befalling their disciples, but Luo Dao was only one of his direct disciples, not his sole disciple.
The great distance between them, and the fact that they were not under the same jurisdiction of the Heavenly Dao, made the transmission of spirit vitality all the more difficult.
Moreover, the Netherworld Sect had not planned this operation against him or the