Seizing the sword seed from the Purple Mansion was the most thorough way to erase a Sword Dao inheritance. Not just the flying sword and the sword spirit within it, but also the flying sword's reflection in the Purple Mansion... it amounted to completely erasing everything about a Sword Cultivator that had to do with the sword. To a Sword Cultivator, that was another life.
His life remained, but his sword was gone. Was he still a Sword Cultivator?
Whether the punishment was severe depended entirely on the angle from which you viewed it. For a Magic Cultivator, it was merely the confiscation of a bonded treasure; they could simply refine another. But a flying sword was irreplaceable to a Sword Cultivator. Sword Cultivators dying of grief after losing their flying swords was no isolated occurrence.
Add expulsion from the tradition... this could be called the harshest punishment short of death. Hou Niao had stirred up trouble for decades without changing. Perhaps his present fate had only been a matter of time?
Breaking rules, starting with small ones and moving on to greater ones, gradually bred the habit of treating rules like dung. One day, those rules would bite back.
Shanmen Quanzhen might have lost a grassroots genius who could rival a Constellation True Disciple, but it had also gained a rare opportunity to unite the tradition. With the great upheaval of Heaven and Earth drawing ever closer, which mattered more: a genius who had yet to mature, or the collective as a whole?
The True Persons had given their answer, one Yu Zhengxing had warned him about long ago, one that went further than exile or confinement.
He had long anticipated all this, so he faced it calmly.
... Seeing that the anticipated commotion had not broken out, the