News of the Floating Cloud City incident spread faster than wildfire. By sunset, every sect within a hundred miles had heard that the former crown prince of the Blue Wind Empire was alive, had somehow regained his cultivation, and had declared open war on the Profound Handle's Xiao clan.

In the Xiao clan's main compound, the elders convened an emergency meeting. The patriarch, Xiao Wuji, sat at the head of the table with a face carved from stone. Twenty years as clan head had taught him that problems were best solved quietly, preferably in the dark, preferably with deniable assets. A resurrected crown prince making public proclamations was exactly the kind of problem he hated most.

'Kill him,' Xiao Wuji said. 'Quietly. Send the Shadow Division.'

The Shadow Division was the Profound Handle's hidden blade — assassins trained in dark profound arts, cultivators who had abandoned the standard leveling system in favor of techniques designed purely for murder. They had killed clan heads, city lords, even an imperial consul or two. One crippled prince, newly restored to the Spirit Profound Realm, should have been routine.

But routine was not the word for Yun Che.

He had anticipated the assassination attempt, because he knew the Xiao clan. He knew they would send their best. He knew exactly which techniques their assassins favored, which ambush points they'd select, which escape routes they'd prepare. He had grown up in the Profound Handle. He had trained with their assassins. He had been one of them, once, in the years before his fall.

When the first assassin found him at a roadside inn that night, Yun Che was waiting with a poison that the Sky Poison Pearl had cultivated specifically to counter the Shadow Division's Qi masking technique. The assassin didn't even have time to draw his weapon before his meridians seized up and he collapsed, twitching, on the wooden floor.

'Tell Xiao Wuji,' Yun Che said, stepping over the paralyzed assassin toward the door, 'that I'm not running away. I'm coming closer.'