Yan Wuyuan gazed out the window and began recounting an old incident in an even voice.
"More than two hundred years ago, the Nine Evil Sect produced a monstrous prodigy without equal."
She did not give his name.
"He spent three years laying his plans, then sacrificed an entire prefectural city-officials, martial artists, commoners, hundreds of thousands of people in all."
The Duty Room fell silent at those words.
Yi Yang looked at Yan Wuyuan and asked in disbelief:
"Hundreds of thousands?"
"Officials, martial artists, commoners. More than three hundred thousand altogether."
Yan Wuyuan lifted her teacup, lightly brushing its rim with her fingertip as she suppressed her killing intent. "That prefectural city originally had more than six hundred thousand people. After the ritual was completed, fewer than half left alive."
Yi Yang did not answer immediately.
He had only just returned from White Dragon Marsh, and the seventy or eighty corpses beneath the Water Eye were still fresh in his memory.
Those people had been drained of blood and flesh, their husks shriveled into clumps, their clothes hanging from their skeletons. The Nine Evil Sect's Incense Master had stood beside the Blood Pool, perfectly composed, utterly indifferent to the bodies.
Seventy or eighty people were already enough to weigh heavily on the heart.
What would it have looked like if hundreds of thousands from that prefectural city had been sent into a Blood Pool as well?
Yi Yang set his teacup on the table.
"Where did that man go in the end?"
"No one knows."
"After the incident, the Imperial City flew into a rage. They sent a Grandmaster-level expert to hunt him down personally."
Grandmaster.
Yi Yang had little understanding of that title, but judging by the gravity in Yan Wuyuan's voice, that level was already far beyond