After Yuwen Taiji and the others left, the first battlefield finally quieted down.

"We’d better be wary of them from now on. Half of us should stay with Qingyu and Tianming the whole time to guide them," Huangfu Fengyun said.

"Now that the council of elders has fractured, the junior sect master is the cornerstone of the sect's revival. His growth will be of the highest concern for us over the next two decades and we can't take this lightly," Shangguan Jingshu said.

Whether or not they supported Yuwen Taiji, they knew better than to not support the cause in front of the public like this. Given how important Tianming was to the sect, the twenty-five elders came to a unanimous conclusion.

As hyperbolic as having half the elders around the two at all times may sound, they couldn't risk leaving the slightest opening for Yuwen Taiji to make the kill. There was no precedent of a genius being protected like this in the sect's history. This was the miracle Tianming had ushered in; nobody other than the witnesses here today would believe something like this.

But if one were privy to the details,...