The grand golden warship of the Righteous Alliance descended upon the Azure Sword Sect like a descending sun, casting a massive shadow over the Cloudsoaring Peak.
Waiting anxiously on the white jade plaza of the main gates was Sect Master Zhao, surrounded by the sect’s core elders. They had been pacing for two days, their Dao hearts trembling with every passing hour.
When the massive wooden ramp finally lowered, Sect Master Zhao held his breath, desperately hoping to see the Imperial Envoy, or perhaps a signed treaty of peace.
Instead, Yan Shuo strolled down the ramp, casually fanning himself with his paper fan. His pristine white robes fluttered in the mountain breeze. But something was fundamentally different about him. The faint, subtle aura of early Foundation Establishment was completely gone. In its place, a dense, flawless, and incredibly stable Core Formation aura radiated from his body, thrumming with absolute vitality.
Clinging tightly to his left arm, her cheeks still dusted with a faint, blissful pink, was the Saintess. She looked completely radiant, practically glowing with an unprecedented level of gentle contentment.
Trailing exactly ten paces behind them was Su Mei, who looked like she hadn’t slept in a decade, her fox ears drooping to her shoulders.
"Lord Yan! Saintess!" Sect Master Zhao hurried forward, bowing deeply, though his eyes widened as he sensed Yan Shuo’s new cultivation base. Core Formation? In two days?! What kind of heaven-defying fortune did they encounter in the Central Continent? "Welcome back," Zhao stammered, his palms sweating. "Did... did the negotiations with the Patriarch go well? Have we settled the karmic debt for the broken door?"
Yan Shuo snapped his fan shut and smiled. It was the warm, benevolent smile of a very wealthy merchant.
"The negotiations were exceptionally smooth, Sect Master," Yan Shuo praised, stepping onto the jade plaza. "The Patriarch was deeply moved by our reasoning. In fact, he was so apologetic for scratching my wife’s hand that he insisted on paying our travel expenses."
Zhao let out a massive, shuddering sigh of relief, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead. "Praise the Heavens! The Righteous Alliance is truly reasonable! I feared they would declare war! How many spirit stones did they offer as an apology? Ten thousand? Twenty?"
Yan Shuo didn’t answer immediately. He casually raised his left hand, turning the dark Abyssal spatial ring on his finger downward.
"A bit more than that," Yan Shuo murmured.
He activated the spatial release.
RUMBLE.
It sounded like a mountain collapsing. A torrential waterfall of blinding, supreme-grade spirit stones erupted from his ring, crashing onto the jade plaza. But it didn’t stop at stones.
Massive crystal chests filled with thousand-year spiritual herbs smashed onto the ground. Racks of glowing, supreme-tier flying swords clattered into a massive pile. Rivers of condensed spiritual dew splashed across the pristine white tiles, filling the courtyard with an intoxicating, impossibly dense medicinal fragrance that made the surrounding elders instantly feel their bottlenecks loosening.
The avalanche of pure, unadulterated wealth continued pouring out of the ring for a full minute, forming a literal mountain that completely buried the sect’s grand statues and spilled over the outer walls.
The entire Azure Sword Sect fell into a dead, horrifying silence.
Sect Master Zhao stared at the mountain of wealth. He saw the golden crest of the Righteous Alliance Central Treasury stamped onto the crystal chests.
Zhao didn’t gasp. He didn’t scream. His eyes simply rolled back into his head, and he tipped over backward like a felled tree, fainting dead away onto the jade tiles.
"Sect Master!" the surrounding elders shrieked, scrambling to catch him, though their own legs were shaking so violently they could barely stand.
Tantai Zhi blinked, leaning her head against Yan Shuo’s shoulder. "Why is he sleeping on the floor, Husband? Is he overwhelmed by your generosity?"
"He simply lacks a broad vision of the world, Zhi’er," Yan Shuo chuckled, entirely unbothered by the fainting Sect Master.
He stepped forward, his lazy demeanor vanishing as he addressed the panicking elders. The heavy, commanding authority of an ancient sovereign crashed over the courtyard, instantly silencing their frantic whispers.
"Wake him up," Yan Shuo ordered, his voice echoing with absolute authority. "The Azure Sword Sect is now officially in closed-door lockdown. Activate the grand defensive arrays to their absolute maximum limit."
An elder swallowed hard, trembling as he looked at the mountain of stolen loot. "L-Lord Yan... the Righteous Alliance... they will send their entire army to slaughter us!"
"They will not send an army," Yan Shuo corrected coldly. "They will send shadows. Use this wealth. Distribute the supreme-grade pills to every elder stuck at a bottleneck. Arm the core disciples with those supreme weapons. If anyone approaches this mountain without my explicit permission, kill them."
He didn’t wait for their compliance. He knew the sheer weight of the stolen treasury would force them to obey. Yan Shuo turned, taking Tantai Zhi’s hand, and led her toward their private courtyard on the peak.
"Come, Wife," Yan Shuo murmured softly. "We have our own foundation to consolidate."
Tantai Zhi’s face instantly flushed a brilliant, scorching crimson, remembering the incredibly intimate dual cultivation of the previous night. "Y-Yes, Husband! I will prepare the incense!"
Thousands of miles away, in the deepest, hidden catacombs beneath the Central Continent.
The Faceless Scholar sat in the center of a blood-red array. He had abandoned the Star-Gazing Pavilion entirely, retreating into the ancient, forgotten tunnels where the light of the Righteous Alliance could not reach.
He had removed his weeping silver mask. His face was pale, his features sharp, but his eyes were sunken and entirely consumed by a paranoid, calculating madness.
Bai Chen. That was his true name. A name buried a century ago.
He coughed, spitting a glob of dark blood onto the stone floor. The backlash of Yan Shuo’s Abyssal Severing Strike still burned within his meridians, a terrifying reminder that the monster had truly returned.
"You think you have won because you stole the treasury, Brother Yan?" Bai Chen whispered to the empty, echoing darkness. "You think you can hide behind the Saintess and rebuild your demonic empire on that mountain?"
Bai Chen picked up a blank, golden decree scroll. But he did not stamp it with the seal of the Righteous Alliance.
He understood Yan Shuo perfectly. Yan Shuo was ruthless, but right now, his physical vessel was only at the Core Formation stage. The Saintess was the ultimate shield, capable of instantly freezing a dozen Grandmasters. A direct siege was suicide.
To kill Yan Shuo, Bai Chen needed to separate the shadow from the light. He needed to create a continental chaos so massive that even the Saintess could not protect him from every angle.
Bai Chen bit his thumb and began to write on the golden scroll using his own blood.
He did not call for justice. He called to greed.
He detailed the existence of an Ancient Anomaly hiding within the Azure Sword Sect—a youth possessing a supreme, gravity-devouring foundation that held the secrets to ascending beyond the mortal realm. He detailed the exact coordinates of the mountain. And he offered a bounty that bypassed spirit stones entirely: The Heavenly Dao Relic.
"The Righteous Alliance is too cowardly to fight a true war," Bai Chen murmured, his blood-soaked brush flying across the parchment. "But the hidden demonic sects... the ancient shadow clans... the wandering slaughter-kings who have slept for a thousand years... they will tear the continent apart for a chance to devour your core."
Bai Chen sealed the bloody decree. With a flick of his wrist, the scroll shattered into a thousand streaks of crimson light, shooting out of the catacombs and scattering across the darkest, most forbidden corners of the mortal realm.
He was not going to fight Demon Lord Yan today. He was going to drown him in the blood of ten thousand greedy cultivators.
The web was cast. The proxy war for the Central Continent had officially begun.