After the Shanmen Annual Assembly, unexpected changes swept through the Mainland Xiuzhen World.
Two years later, at the Southwest Daoist Assembly held once every nine years, the Wu Sect, which had consistently opposed Shanmen Quanzhen in the Southwest, declared decisively that its nineteen True Disciples would be reassessed through a grand competition.
The Wu Sect was a collective name. Over the past few centuries, it had absorbed several smaller Daoist sects nearby, including half of the Anhe Daoist Sect, which was why it had as many as nineteen True Disciples.
Shanmen Quanzhen had changed, and they had no choice but to change too. Otherwise, they could not contend with the increasingly forceful and aggressive power of the Sword Lineage. This was a trend, like gambling: the other side had raised the stakes-would you call?
They could only call. There was no other way.
Moreover, the Wu Sect faced another thorny problem: who would succeed its Constellation True Disciple, Tang Yan, after he advanced to Golden Core? Although the decision was not theirs to make, they needed a few genuinely presentable disciples to step forward.
They could only discard the restrictions of background, birth, lineage, and so on that shackled the vast grassroots population, and lay everything out on the table, hoping only to find a few among their enormous body of cultivators who concealed their abilities, playing the pig to devour the tiger.
In fact, they really did find a few. Once institutional oppression was gone, the speed at which the grassroots rose was terrifying.
It was all to counter Shanmen Quanzhen, Northern Anhe, which wallowed in the same mire as Quanzhen, and that dog in Northern Anhe who robbed them of sleep and appetite-Hou Niao, the Heavenly Dog Star. They believed that this position had been snatched from the