He looked down at Qing Chen, whose posture was humble and whose words were earnest, holding the jade slip bearing his resignation as ripples began to stir in his heart.
Back then, with the combat strength of a pseudo-Nascent Soul, Qing Chen had brazenly charged into Miaochong Prefecture, attained an immortal physical body and become a Nascent Soul True Lord, then slain Purple Spider and Hundred Poisons, two old devils of many years, amid the miasma of myriad poisons.
Those battles had left mountains of corpses and seas of blood, and forged the fiercest reputation Miaochong Prefecture had seen in a hundred years.
It was he, Xiao Canglan, who had seen the value in that, overridden all objections, and promoted this man from a mere deputy general outside the usual rules, granting him the rank of third-class marquis, appointing him a general with the main seal, and bestowing authority, fortune, and vast quantities of cultivation resources upon him. Only then had the Azure Abyss Marquis, whose might shook Qiongzhou today, come to exist.
To his mind, he had merely honed another vicious blade.
Was Qing Chen the only blade in his hand? Wherever their edges pointed, they ought to reclaim immortal lands for him and scour away demons and evil.
The Ten Thousand Saints Demon Kingdom was stirring up trouble in the Southwest, and the Golden Tent Khanate was pressing against the Northern Border. When the time came, he would throw Qing Chen into the fray like a blade, letting him slaughter and wear himself down.
He would use Qing Chen's sharp edge to break the stalemate, then use the brutal war to grind away his wings and exhaust his value.
After several hundred years of war between nations, this blade would either chip or snap. That was the end