The Root Division assembled under the flickering light of moonlit lanterns, the echoes of the warning bells still thrumming in the mountain wind. Feilun Sect had not convened its full division council at such urgency in decades. The disciples of every rank filed into the Grand Hall, their faces pale, their eyes betraying the same thought—foreign blades had tasted Feilun soil, and the heavens themselves had witnessed Tian Shen's slaughter.
At the hall's center stood the long table carved of starwood, its surface etched with ancestral talismans. Elders sat in a crescent around it, their eyes heavy and scrutinizing. At the head, beneath banners of storm and mountain, Sect Master Feilun Yao brooded with hands clasped.
Tian Shen entered last.
