Hou Niao started in alarm. He had always respected this Xiao True Person of the Anhe Daoist Sect, even though the man had made a complete mess of his own lineage.
Xiao True Person belonged to the sort who remained sober while everyone else was drunk. He would have suited some great Daoist lineage in the universe, watching coldly through the endless passage of years and grasping the essence beneath countless changes. The Anhe Daoist Sect was simply too small-too small to accommodate someone like him.
As an enemy, you could call him someone whose eyes reached higher than his hands, but a talent for theory was still a talent. He was the perfect match for someone like Hou Niao, whose hands reached higher than his eyes.
Xiao True Person remained perfectly composed. "Watching the stars last night, I happened to dream... all right, enough nonsense. I'll just share a few wild fancies of my own. No foundation, no source, no corroboration-just the foolish dreams of a decrepit old man who's lived a few hundred years. I'll say them for what they're worth, and you can listen in the same spirit. If you find them absurd, just take them as something to laugh at."
Beside him, True Person An smiled. "Good! Then let this old friend hear what sort of dreams you've been having."
Hou Niao sat up straight. He knew this might be a dream, or it might be an old cultivator's sudden stirring of intuition from the Unseen.
Xiao True Person raised his head, as though trying to see through the roof and pierce the heavens. "One crucial turning point is the New Era the Upper Realm Visitors speak of. In their accounts, this marked a dividing line for the universe's cultivation world, bringing changes that overturned heaven