Troubled Times!

Another autumn came.

The skies over White Cloud Commandery began to darken with turmoil. Trouble struck first in the south.

Han Qing, the lone Foundation Establishment Rogue Cultivator, had grown increasingly hungry after swallowing up two small Qi Refining clans...

He gathered a group of Rogue Cultivators and reached for a mineral vein under White Cloud Temple's name.

Song He, White Cloud Temple's second elder, sent two Foundation Establishment stewards to negotiate.

The negotiations ended with two corpses thrown in front of White Cloud Temple's gates.

One had been beheaded; the other's Dantian had been shattered.

Han Qing left a message: "If White Cloud Temple still has a Golden Core cultivator holding down the fort, I, Han Qing, will naturally give it a wide berth. If not..."

"Then whoever has the harder fist calls the shots over White Cloud Commandery's mineral veins."

The news spread through all nine counties, throwing the entire commandery into an uproar.

White Cloud Temple was furious. Song He personally led four Foundation Establishment elders out to hunt Han Qing down.

Five against one, they pursued him for three full days, driving Han Qing to the banks of the Cang River. He killed another Foundation Establishment elder in a counterattack before finally leaping into the river, leaving no trace of his body.

White Cloud Temple had won, but it had lost another Foundation Establishment cultivator.

On the day Song He returned to the mountain, he was said to have knelt in the patriarch's hall for an entire night.

When Sun Bo'an heard the news, he was fertilizing the spirit fields on the mountain behind the estate, looking every bit a farmer.

He squatted on the ridge between the fields and wiped his forehead with a muddy hand. After a long while, he finally said, "Burning that letter back then was the right choice."

Sun Kezheng stood beside him, a chill running down his back.

If they had answered Han Qing's letter and gotten mixed up with him, the Sun Clan would probably be facing a reckoning from White Cloud Temple now...

"But Han Qing is dead. Someone has to take over the territories of those small clans he swallowed up in the south," Sun Kezheng ventured.

"What the hell does that have to do with us?"

Sun Bo'an rose and brushed the dirt from his knees. Without looking back, he said, "Whoever wants it can have it. The Sun Clan doesn't need that little bit of land for now."

Han Qing's affair was only the beginning.

After winter set in, trouble in White Cloud Commandery came one incident after another, like floodwaters through an opened sluice gate, leaving everyone on edge.

First came infighting within the Chen Clan Alliance in the north.

Not long after the three Foundation Establishment powers had joined forces, they fell out for reasons unknown, even coming to blows.

The ink on the alliance pact from Chen Yu's "meeting friends through literature" tea gathering had barely dried before an ally bit back. In the end, a Foundation Establishment cultivator of the Chen Clan died in an ambush by that "ally"!

Chen Yu flew into a rage and wiped out the clan that had betrayed the alliance that very night, but was injured as well and withdrew into Hong'an County to lick those wounds.

A county's Foundation Establishment clan had been wiped out, yet White Cloud Temple said nothing.

The north had fallen into chaos.

Then an even thornier problem arose: Devil Cultivators swept through the region once more!

On the thirteenth day of the twelfth lunar month, a Qi Refining clan in Green Maple County, at the southeastern corner of White Cloud Commandery, was attacked.

In a single night, all twenty-seven cultivators of the small clan died sudden, bizarre deaths. Every one of them wore a smile, but their internal organs had all turned to black water...

It was the work of a devilish Cultivation Method.

White Cloud Temple sent people to investigate, but after half a month, they had not found so much as a shadow.

The following month.

Two more small clans were wiped out. This time, fifty-three cultivators died.

Song He had no choice but to act again. They could ignore infighting in their territory, but if they ignored a Devil Cultivator wreaking havoc there, their superior sect would punish them.

And so Song He took three Foundation Establishment elders deep into the southeastern mountains to hunt the culprit down,

They found him.

He was a Foundation Establishment Middle Stage Devil Cultivator who practiced a sinister art called the Ten Thousand Laughs Yin Corpse Art, hunting down low-level cultivators specifically to refine corpses.

In that battle, White Cloud Temple fought three against one and won a bitter victory.

The Devil Cultivator was slain, but one Foundation Establishment elder fell on the spot. Another was gravely injured, his meridians severed, his cultivation falling to the Qi Refining Realm, with no hope of recovery in this lifetime.

Song He himself was injured as well, having overdrawn more than half his Law Power...

He returned to the temple and shut himself away, never showing his face again.

The news reached Hongtian City.

Sun Bo'an sat in the council hall, staring at the increasingly thin register of White Cloud Temple's cultivators on his desk, silent for a long time.

Two years ago, when Zhao Qing had sacrificed herself for the Dao,

White Cloud Temple had still had twenty-three Foundation Establishment cultivators, a power that had flourished in its day!

Several had died in the beast tide. The chaos caused by Han Qing had cost it another two, then taken one more, and the Devil Cultivator's rampage had claimed one life and crippled another.

Now, even counting every last one of them, White Cloud Temple had...

Fourteen.

And three of those fourteen were old and frail, liable to reach the end of their lifespans and pass away at any moment.

In truth, barely more than ten could fight.

A sect that had once dominated White Cloud Commandery for centuries had fallen so far in just a few short years...

"Bo'an."

Sun Kezheng pushed the door open and entered, his expression grim...

"What is it?"

"Lü Fangzhi is dead."

Sun Bo'an's hand froze.

Lü Fangzhi, the White Cloud Temple Foundation Establishment disciple who had led the team during the mountain-clearing operation, had swordlike brows and starry eyes. He had held his nose in the air and acted as though only the heavens ranked above him.

Though he had not been particularly close to the Sun Clan, they had worked together, so there was at least some acquaintance between them.

"How did he die?"

"Two Foundation Establishment Rogue Cultivators ambushed and killed him while he was inspecting the outlying mineral veins."

Sun Kezheng's voice was low. "Those two Foundation Establishment Rogue Cultivators are said to be Han Qing's brothers. They lay low for more than half a year, then started targeting White Cloud Temple's Foundation Establishment stewards and elders whenever they were alone..."

"Lü Fangzhi's lifebound flying sword was taken, and his body was dumped outside White Stone Town. It wasn't found until three days later..."

Sun Bo'an closed his eyes.

As he remembered him, Lü Fangzhi had indeed been young, arrogant, and hard to like.

But he had been a Foundation Establishment cultivator in his twenties, a genius with boundless prospects in any small place.

Yet in this chaos, even a genius was as fragile as an ant.

"There's something else."

Sun Kezheng lowered his voice. "Daoist Master Yunsong of Changqing Temple is gone too. Last month, he was sweeping the south for evil fiends when he ran into a band of roaming Demon Beast remnants on his way back..."

Yunsong.

That Foundation Establishment cultivator of White Cloud Temple had been an upright man. He had known Sun Bo'an and the Sun Clan for a long time, and he had come to collect their spirit tax every year.

With his talent, he had had hope of reaching the Golden Core Realm someday. Sun Bo'an had never expected that the next news he heard of him would be of his death...

Sun Bo'an remained silent for a long time.

"Prepare a generous gift and send it quietly to White Cloud Temple."

"Tell them... the Sun Clan remembers the kindness."

That night, Sun Bo'an stood alone before the entrance to the formation on the mountain behind the estate.

The fluctuations of Spiritual Qi within the formation were several times more turbulent than they had been a year ago...

He heard muffled thuds coming from deep within the cave abode, one after another, dull and powerful, as though something were striking an invisible wall.

The ground trembled faintly, and the loose stones beneath his feet were jumping.

Just then, Sun Kezheng appeared behind him without his knowing when, standing ten paces away with one hand on the hilt of his saber.

"Bo'an, Zhou Sun sent word. Things haven't been peaceful outside the city lately. Several groups of Rogue Cultivators of unknown origin have come up from the south. I've sent people to watch them."

"Keep a close eye on them. Don't beat the grass and startle the snake."

"All right, I understand."

Sun Kezheng nodded and turned to leave, but stopped after a step. "Bo'an, Old Ancestor Shi... should be close, shouldn't he?"

Sun Bo'an looked back at him but did not answer.

But the knuckles of the hand gripping his cuff had turned white.

Soon.

It has to be soon.

In the deepest part of the cave abode on the mountain behind the estate, the crack-like lights across Shi Jian's body were growing denser and brighter.

The barrier to the Foundation Establishment Middle Stage within him had gone from loosening...

To cracking apart!

He had slept for nearly five years and more, and all the medicinal power of the spirit medicines he had swallowed had been transformed into the foundation for his breakthrough.

Now, within the cracks in that barrier, a faint yet blazing thread of Demon Power was trying to break through the wall...