Lone Pine Mountain!
It stood atop the snowy mountains.
Beneath a lone pine on one of the peaks, He Pingsheng sat in a chair carved from an enormous stone, leisurely sipping Spirit Tea as he gazed at the unbroken stretch of snow-white mountains in the distance.
A thick blanket of snow covered the mountains, yet great expanses of upright rock protruded through it, their surfaces greenish or black.
Immortal Maiden Hazy Moon sat opposite He Pingsheng.
"Ever since Lone Pine fell, the disciples on Lone Pine Mountain have scattered like birds and beasts!" Long Yue said, seemingly casually. "Now, only a few dozen disciples with nowhere else to go remain here to guard it. In these ten years, no one has occupied the sect here!"
"In another ten years, I fear it will be completely abandoned!"
He Pingsheng was puzzled. "That's not right... by all rights, someone should have occupied it!"
Long Yue shook her head. "Because someone extracted the dragon soul of the Spirit Vein here!"
"In ten or twenty years, Lone Pine Mountain's spiritual energy will be exhausted!"
"When that happens, not only will there be no spiritual energy, even these green plants will wither, and the Mountain Gate will be buried beneath snow!"
Understanding dawned on He Pingsheng. "So that's why!"
Still, whoever had extracted the Spirit Vein Soul here had truly done something utterly vile.
After they waited at the summit of Lone Pine Mountain for roughly four hours, two streaks of light, one red and one blue, came together from the horizon.
In an instant, the two streaks landed before He Pingsheng and Immortal Maiden Hazy Moon.
The lights resolved into a man and a woman.
He Pingsheng swept his Divine Sense over them.
The man's cultivation was at the Eleventh Layer of Spirit Transformation