Ten years had passed since the catastrophe in which the Nine Provinces joined with the Demon Savage Continent.
Ten years was neither a long time nor a short one.
For mortals, it was enough for a child to grow up;
For cultivators, it was merely the flick of a finger.
Yet in those brief ten years, the landscape of the Nine Provinces had been reshaped, its many powers shuffled anew. Countless Dao lineages licked their wounds amid the catastrophe's lingering embers, while new powers seized the moment to rise.
Viewed from high above the nine heavens, however, those ten years seemed to have changed nothing at all.
Fortuitous opportunities were still fought over, inheritances still snatched away.
Sects still battled openly and schemed in secret, while the righteous and the wicked remained as incompatible as fire and water.
The cultivators were still the same cultivators, and the Cultivation Realm was still the same Cultivation Realm.
Only occasionally, when someone looked up at the sky, would they remember the vision of that nine-colored great sun hanging overhead, of blood raining across the firmament.
They would remember the Peerless Sword Lord who had turned back the crashing tide and propped up the edifice on the verge of collapse.
In the end, the Demon Savage Continent's heavenly Dao will had been entirely devoured by the Nine Provinces Heavenly Dao.
That struggle between domains had ended in victory for the Nine Provinces.
The two great domains slowly melded within the chaos, their world barriers dissolving and their domain membranes becoming one.
From then on, the Demon Savage Continent sank into the territory of the Nine Provinces, becoming its tenth province beyond the original nine.
The Dao Alliance worked tirelessly toward this end, issuing policies great and small, one after another.
Over those ten years,