The village path was half an hour.
The mountain air at dawn had the clean cold of high elevation and the specific spiritual density of a purified geography—the herbs in the cave's surrounding area were still at work, the decades-old contamination fully cleared, the ambient qi of the mountain noticeably richer than it had been before Cang had arrived and begun his systematic dismantlement of two thousand years of dragon-qi corruption.
Wei Lingyue's formation-sight read it as she walked.
"The spiritual density here is—" She paused. "This is the output of a Nascent Soul-grade purification event. This entire mountain zone has been cleansed."
"I had time," he said.
"This would have taken a sect's full elder board eighteen months," she said.
"I had good herbs," he said.
