"This was a trap that the Poisonous Woman set for my husband and me, gathering several sects of the Nine Prefectures to help her."
Haitang spoke, her gaze turning somewhat cold and fierce.
"The Poisonous Woman? Could you mean the Imperial Consort?"
"Precisely. But she had another identity: my former youngest junior sister, Qi Luoyu."
Haitang sighed.
Then she briefly recounted to Xu Taiping the grudges between herself, her youngest junior sister, and several major powers of the Nine Prefectures, along with this Dao Seal Contest.
Qi Haitang, Xiang Nantian, and Qi Luoyu had all come from a secluded mountain establishment called Third Watch Observatory.
Around seven hundred years ago, the Observatory Master of Third Watch Observatory had disappeared, and its disciples had left the mountain one after another. Each possessed peerless divine abilities, prompting the great mountain establishments of the Nine Prefectures to scramble for them.
That upheaval had nearly changed the balance of power in the Nine Prefectures at the time. In those years, almost all the top-ranked competitors in the Nine Prefectures Sword Champion Contest had been disciples of Third Watch Observatory.
But Qi Haitang and Xiang Nantian had joined none of the Nine Prefectures' sects. Instead, they had become Dao Companions and traveled the world, continuing their search for the missing observatory master.
Yet it was also then that a rumor had suddenly spread through the Nine Prefectures: the true legacy of Third Watch Observatory was actually in Xiang Nantian and Qi Haitang's hands.
In the days that followed, disciples of the Nine Prefectures and rogue cultivators alike had begun hunting for the pair's whereabouts.
Their leisurely days of traveling the world had ended there. They had begun hiding wherever they could while fending off murderous ambushes from the Nine Prefectures' cultivators.
Their cultivation had also