The sun stood high overhead.
In the deep sea outside the golden barrier, the water had turned a luminous emerald green.
Light pierced down from the sea's surface, refracting into scattered flecks on the barrier before falling across the Dragon Palace's white jade floors.
Lin Shisan had stood outside the Purple Sky Hall for four full hours.
Little Stone was still lying in bed in the guest courtyard.
Although the Little Black Cauldron's Seven-Colored Rosy Light suppressed the pale blue mark on his forehead, that was only temporary.
The twenty-four hours were slipping away, second by second.
He looked at the tightly shut Black Iron doors.
The reliefs of nine enormous dragons on their surface gleamed with a cold metallic luster beneath the pearls' radiance.
The gemstones set in the dragons' eyes were like nine pairs of silent eyes, looking down on him from above.
Zi Yuner stood beside him, her expression composed, but a barely perceptible trace of anxiety lay suppressed in her deep purple eyes.
She, too, had stood here for four hours without taking even half a step away.
"Princess, your father..."
"He'll see us."
Zi Yuner cut him off.
Her voice was soft, but her tone was firm. "He promised me he would give me an answer before noon."
Lin Shisan nodded silently.
He silently felt the Spiritual Power replenished within his Dantian and the strength surging through his sixth Spirit Vein.
His cultivation at the sixth stage of Meridian Opening was far more powerful than before.
But he knew that before the master of the Dragon Palace, his meager cultivation was no different from an ant's, nowhere near enough.
He could even sense a presence as vast as the sea awakening behind those Black Iron doors.
That presence weighed on his chest like an immense