At the very moment murderous intent lurked on every side at Fallen Soul Slope, and Qing Chen burned his essence blood as he tore through the sky-
News that Blackstone City in Qiongzhou, Lingnan Circuit, had fallen, that Baihe County City in the Mysterious Prefecture of the Southeastern Circuit had been attacked, and that the Imperial Envoy and his party's fate remained unknown spread wildly through Great Jin's secret underground channels like wildfire that had sprouted wings.
It traveled countless times faster than the official eight-million-li express dispatches, carrying border beacon fires and calculations of power across a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers, crashing toward Great Jin's true center-the Divine Capital Prefecture, foremost of the Capital Region's seven prefectures.
When this news became jade slips engraved with coded messages and landed on the desks of those powerful figures, the undercurrents it stirred were far more turbulent than Southern Yue's blades and armies.
The Divine Capital Prefecture housed the Imperial Capital, where dragon qi coiled.
The estate of the Nine Netherworlds Iron Household did not nestle beside Jade Capital Mountain, the imperial city. Instead, it lay tens of thousands of li away, beside the spirit-rich Luo River, occupying an entire blessed grotto-heaven where the land's spiritual beauty gathered.
The estate stretched for fifty li. Its high walls were cast from thousand-year-old dark iron mixed with various spirit clays, their tops covered in runes that suppressed baleful forces; terraces, pavilions, and towers stood half-hidden among thousand-year-old trees and spirit plants. There was no heaped-up glitter of jewels, no extravagance taken to its utmost, yet it exuded the weight accumulated by an aristocratic clan over ten thousand years.
Before the estate gates stood two lifelike black jade qilin, each three zhang tall, every pattern on their scales clearly discernible. High-grade spirit