In truth, Shiheng had never taken the two female cultivators seriously from beginning to end.
Over the past several years, he had watched coldly as they courted the powerful and borrowed their authority to intimidate others, clinging to power and scraping by. Never once had he felt the slightest desire to kill them.
He understood how difficult survival in Purgatory was. He also knew full well that, trapped in the desperate depths of the Demonic Grotto, people would willingly bow their heads, endure in silence, and swallow humiliation to stay alive.
Without having suffered another's pain, do not urge them to be good!
In the chaos of Purgatory, staying alive was itself the greatest luxury.
So he tolerated their servility, their flattery, and every contemptible posture they adopted to scrape by.
In Shiheng's eyes, their foundations were shallow and their cultivation meager. They would remain at the bottom all their lives, incapable of stirring up any trouble. They were not worth raising a hand to punish, much less sparing a thought to take issue with.
But he had never imagined that human evil could become so twisted.
No one stopped them from scraping by; no one condemned them for clinging to power; everyone could understand their fear of death and abandonment of integrity.
But they should never, ever have poured the darkness and venom in their hearts onto their own kin who held fast to their principles.
Ryder and Linor had never provoked them, never excluded them in the slightest, never competed with them for even the smallest share of resources.
The siblings had merely cultivated quietly and diligently, steadily comprehending the Dao, preserving the Human Race's last measure of integrity and sincerity in this filthy Purgatory.
Destroying the siblings' paths of cultivation and crippling their lifetime of practice would