Downstairs from the top floor was the Directorate of Celestial Observation's assembly hall, normally used when the Chief Astronomer summoned sect leaders and sect masters to discuss matters.
Xie Jinhuan descended the stairs. The corridor was deserted and the doors shut, but through the walls, he could still hear Lu Wuzhen's unhurried voice from inside:
"If evil demons and heretical cultivators were so easily exterminated to the last, why would the common people need to squander the fat and marrow of their labor supporting so many sects? To rid the world of malevolent beings, what matters is keeping watch every day, without slacking for a hundred years, and exercising strict self-discipline. As the saying goes, lust is the foremost of all evils..."
Xie Jinhuan had intended to go inside for a look, but hearing this unpalatable lecture, he stopped. He merely peeked through a window to see whether Old Lu was taking veiled digs at Old Li again.
More than twenty people sat inside the assembly hall, all leaders of sects within a thousand miles. Li Chimo, however, was presumably confiscating property in Misty-Wave City at the moment and was not among them.
As the Cinnabar Cauldron Sect's third-in-command, Sect Leader Nangong clearly could not miss an occasion like this. She sat in the front row, wearing a black-and-white Daoist robe with a White Jade Crown atop her head. Paired with her beautiful phoenix eyes, commanding even without anger, she looked coldly alluring and solitary. Her presence suggested the Cinnabar Cauldron Sect's sect master even more than Lu Wuzhen's did. The breathtaking sight inevitably reminded Xie Jinhuan of her unapproachable beauty when they first met, as well as the tender warmth of her "guh-oh-oh-oh." The corners of his mouth curled up unconsciously.
But as he secretly watched his mother-in-law, a