Unsheathed

In the past, the western mountains were mostly deserted, only visited by lumberjacks and kiln workers who were burning charcoal and digging up soil. In contrast, the mountains were currently filled with immortal manors, as well as the immortal ferry station on Ox Horn Mountain.

Chen Ping'an had seen on more than one occasion the local children of the small town squatting to the walls, looking up at the sky as they waited for an intercontinental ship to fly past, and whenever they caught sight of one, they would immediately erupt into raucous celebration.

On the way back to Downtrodden Mountain, Chen Ping'an and Pei Qian encountered an immortal convoy traveling to the Robe Sash Peak.

One of the downsides to establishing abodes here was that they were rather inconvenient to access as Ruan Qiong had stipulated that cultivators were not to travel through this place by flight. However, as time passed and he founded the Dragon Spring Sword Sect, he was no longer just the sage overseeing this area.

Instead, he had become a sect leader that had to establish a network of connections, and he began to loosen up a little on his rules. He assigned Dong Gu with the task of setting out several flight routes, and those routes would be accessible to those who were able to receive passage tokens from the Dragon Spring Sword Sect in the form of miniature iron swords.

However, up to this point, barely any of the dozen or so immortal powers in the Dragon Spring Prefecture had received these swords, not because the Dragon Spring Sword Sect was being particularly selective with whom these swords were being given to. Instead, it was because the forger of these swords wasn't Ruan Qiong, nor was it any of his direct disciples.

Instead, it was his only daughter, and the rate at which she produced these swords was agonizingly slow, barely able to churn out a single one in a year, but no one felt it appropriate to visit the sect and implore her to speed up her progress. Even if someone were shameless enough to do so, they may not possess the courage.

At the moment, there was a rumor circulating that a palace minister of the Ministry of Rites had led a group of elite sticky rod officials of the Great Li Empire on a southbound journey to "reason with" Bamboo Scroll Lake, and it was said that Ruan Xiu had settled everything through her own power.

The ancestral hall of the immortal sect that had purchased the Robe Sash Peak was situated in the Blissful Dream Nation, which was also home to Dawn Cloud Mountain.

The sect was ranked near the bottom among second-rate immortal powers of the Eastern Treasured Vial Continent, and during that period of time where things had begun to look back for the Great Li Empire, the sect had also wanted to move out of the empire, but at that point, an abode had already been constructed on the mountain, and they couldn't bear to let the money it had taken to construct the abode go to waste.

On top of that, an ancestor of the ancestral hall, also the only remaining Golden Core Tier earth immortal of the sect, had already moved to the Robe Sash Peak and was cultivating there, accompanied by only his disciples, grand-disciples, and some servants.