More and more traces of Demon Beasts appeared near the Immortal City.
Gradually, everyone sensed something was wrong. Not only the cultivators, but even the mortals living near the Immortal City began to feel uneasy.
The Immortal City had stood here for over two hundred years. Mortal towns and villages spread outward around it in concentric rings, and generations of Rogue Cultivator descendants had reclaimed the surrounding land, long since turning it into a paradise.
Human expansion went hand in hand with the retreat of Demon Beasts.
Perhaps after several thousand more years of continual human expansion, the territory ruled by the Immortal City would become settled land suitable for mortals to live and multiply in. By then, a nation would also arise here.
Even now, Demon Beasts of the second tier and above had all but vanished within nearly a thousand li of the Immortal City!
The reason the mortals felt uneasy was simple: Demon Beasts were appearing far too frequently.
Some remote mortal villages had even been destroyed by Demon Beasts, their entire populations ending up in the beasts' bellies!
Fortunately, just as their unease mounted, the Immortal City issued a level-two Beast Tide warning and dispatched cultivators to transport all the mortals outside the city into it for temporary shelter.
With flying boats and high-capacity Storage Bags, the Immortal City evacuated the affected mortals extremely quickly.
In less than a month, the millions of mortals near the Immortal City had successfully entered it to seek refuge, apart from an unfortunate few who had fallen prey to Demon Beasts.
Even the Qi Refining Lineages under the Immortal City's jurisdiction abandoned their Ancestral Grounds one after another and temporarily took refuge within the city.
For a time, the Outer City was almost packed beyond capacity. Even the Inner