...Once I bore a sword to distant war, the passes and rivers of Qin and Yue within my gaze. Grown old, I dream no more of fame and merit; let the black-haired lords claim their places in Lingyan Hall.
After sweeping over the Wei Kingdom and passing through several smaller kingdoms, they found the land beneath them growing less prosperous, its population visibly thinning. Sometimes they flew an entire day without seeing a town, and so they knew they had reached the continent's Northwest, comparatively the most barren part of the entire continent.
Hou Niao actually had two routes to choose from. One was to enter the Southeast Region directly after leaving the Southwest and take Xiangfei Bamboo to the Chu Sect first. This had also been their original plan. But Xiangfei Bamboo had not left the southwestern coast for decades, and once she entered the interior, she became reluctant to leave. She pestered them relentlessly, demanding to travel with them first and be taken to the Chu Sect afterward.
As far as she was concerned, there was no time limit to begin with. Half a year earlier or a year later made no difference whatsoever. The two leaders could do nothing against her pestering, and with the other three female cultivators helping her, they could only reluctantly agree, helpless.
In fact, this was not necessarily a bad thing for Xiangfei Bamboo herself. Cultivation could not be separated from traveling ten thousand miles, and it was not merely a matter of broadening one's horizons.
"It feels as though we've come to a yellow ocean," Nie Yingnan described it.
Yellow dunes rose like surging waves: the same boundless expanse, the same yellow sand and blue sky, the same utter absence of people. Their luck was poor. A dozen or so days