Divine Spears and Ghostly Lightning Dance Across Southern Heaven: Treat Me as Grass and Chaff, and I Repay You with Blood and Fire

After Meng Zhang and Long Ling left the Ice Crystal Cave, they sealed its entrance and hurried together toward the Sea-Quelling Hall.

Ordinarily, these two-the most powerful figures in the South Sea-would have carried themselves with imposing majesty and impeccable dignity, never casually laughing or chatting as they walked. But circumstances were different now. With the situation urgent, Meng Zhang and Long Ling discussed their response as they hurried along. By the time they reached the Sea-Quelling Hall's broad, gleaming white-jade steps, sovereign and minister had worked out two important strategies.

The first and most pressing arose from Zhang Xingyan's summoning of countless skeletal undead: there was no guarantee that the Four Rivers side had not secretly colluded with Zhuyou's Ghost Clan. They therefore could not lower their guard against Ghostside to the southeast. During their brief exchange, Meng Zhang decided that, however desperate the fighting at the front became, they must not lightly redeploy the Sea-Quelling Floating City guarding the ghost realm, lest they fall for an enemy scheme to lure the tiger away from its mountain.

Small wonder Meng Zhang acted as though facing a formidable enemy. In his present state, he truly had a "ghost" weighing on his conscience. That ghost was the former Ghost Spirit Abyss, now called God's Field. Judging by the Four Rivers proclamation he had just received, the Four Rivers Dragon King might already have seen through the closely guarded secret within the abyss. Leaving aside all the other high-sounding reasons for this campaign against the South Sea, its most fundamental purpose was for that stubborn old relic, the Lord of the Clouds, to prevent Meng Zhang from unlocking a secret that had lain dormant in the Ghost Spirit Abyss for thousands of years. Once that secret saw daylight again, the bright, orderly