"The Soul Infant Sect shall be destroyed today!!!"
Suddenly, a thunderous voice erupted across the heavens, drowning out the cheers of countless millions.
When that voice rang out, everyone was stunned.
The Soul Infant Sect was, at this very moment, the radiant hope of countless cultivators seeking to advance their cultivation. How could anyone dare say such a thing now?
Those words were nothing short of treason.
"So the time has come at last, Ying Mingchao… I knew you would come."
At that moment, the Sect Master of the Soul Infant Sect gazed toward the distant horizon with a faint smile on his face.
The cultivators present had limited strength and likely could not see that far, but the Sect Master of the Soul Infant Sect was, after all, a second-rate True Immortal. With his power, his visual range was naturally extraordinary.
And so he had already seen it — the allied army that was marching toward their Chen City.
Before long, the allied forces led by Ying Mingchao appeared within everyone's line of sight.
"Ying Mingchao, is it really them?"
"What? Ying Mingchao is here? What are they doing here?"
Not everyone present could see Ying Mingchao and his forces. But through the whispers spreading through the crowd, everyone learned that Ying Mingchao had arrived.
"Ying Mingchao, was the humiliation you suffered that day not enough? You actually dare come here to cause trouble again?" The sect master of the Sword Wielding Immortal Sect addressed Ying Mingchao.
"Amitabha, Benefactor Ying, why must you do this?"
The abbot of the Buddha Light Heavenly Temple rose to his feet as well, his words laced with a thread of mockery.
"Ying Mingchao, the Sect Master already showed you mercy that day and let you go. Yet here you are again, causing a disturbance. How can anyone be so shameless?"
Following that, more and more people began to ridicule Ying Mingchao and his companions.
These were people who did not know the truth. First, they truly believed that the Soul Infant Sect would help them. Second, they had no idea that the Soul Infant Sect Master had secretly pursued and tried to kill Ying Mingchao and the others afterward.
All they knew was that Ying Mingchao had once led an allied army to attack the Soul Infant Sect, only to be defeated by the Sect Master. But instead of making things difficult for Ying Mingchao, the Sect Master had simply let him go.
In their eyes, Ying Mingchao returning today to stir up trouble was nothing more than relentless pestering — the behavior of someone utterly without shame.
Naturally, they looked down on Ying Mingchao and his people. And naturally, some began to attack them with their words.
"I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. The great Lord Ying Mingchao, and he turns out to be this kind of person."
"You really can't judge a book by its cover."
The number of people mocking Ying Mingchao only grew. Those who hadn't even been there that day, those who couldn't even see Ying Mingchao, joined in the ridicule.
In a matter of moments, a man who had been a hero in countless people's eyes became the target of universal scorn — an object of disgust, attacks, and even hatred.
"How foolish."
Looking at these fickle faces, a deep look of revulsion surfaced on Ying Mingchao's own face.
He had seen the fickleness of human nature many times before, but this scene today chilled him to the bone. After all, many of the people now attacking him had once been his admirers, his worshippers.
Yet the moment their interests shifted, they had flipped their allegiance without hesitation.
That kind of switch truly made his heart go cold.
"The Sect Master of the Soul Infant Sect, isn't it? My brother Chu Feng… w-where… where is he right now?"
Just then, Wang Qiang stepped out from within the allied army, positioning himself at the very front.