"Send word to the Blood God Sect and the Dugu Household. I want to know whether they've heard anything."
Su Zixuan bowed, accepted the order, and withdrew from the Blood Hall.
Qing Chen looked at the jade-slip ledgers left on the desk, a faint shadow settling between his brows.
A dozen or so years ago, envoys from various nations had scrambled to present him with treasures for a hundred thousand sets of Dharma Artifact armor and a few batches of Formation Artifacts.
Now that he had killed the Black Fox King and possessed greater strength and authority, his smuggling business had instead grown quieter and quieter.
What the hell was going on?
At that moment, Qing Chen still did not know that those seemingly inexplicable ceasefires actually all pointed to the same place-the Reincarnation Dead Sea.
The decline in smuggling over the preceding years had merely been due to the heavy toll of years of warfare;
the major events that had recently occurred in that Darkness Forbidden Zone, however, had become a catalyst, forcing the various powers of the Nanhua Realm to temporarily set aside their struggles and turn their attention beyond the realm.
Thus, orders to postpone hostilities came down one after another, and the leaders on both sides reached a rare, unspoken understanding.
Qing Chen was about to put away the ledgers on the desk when he suddenly started and looked up toward the outside of the underground palace.
His divine sense followed the Dao seal into the Nine Profound Suppression of the North Formation.
Everything inside and outside Yanmen Pass was as usual, and the cultivators guarding the formation had noticed nothing amiss.
Yet at a convergence of earth veins far from the main city, someone had briefly nudged two strands of formation power that had originally