Unlike for entering the mountain, there was no check of identification or roadblock at the exit. I waited outside as the banquet cleared.In the hour I had spent outside the banquet hall, a mortal servant had sat and swept the same street over and over. He was obviously watching me. I stared back, arms folded as my back rested against he wall. Each time he had looked up we had made eye contact, and he nervously looked back down, continuing to sweep the dust on the ground back and forth.Second rate lowlife thugs embedded in a sect. I clicked my tongue, pushing off the wall as crowds of mortals departed from the banquet, and descended the lift down into the city. Eyes burned on my back the entire way. The footsteps following me grew in number, and I did not return to the hotel. Instead, I headed to the dilapidated and emptied neighborhood that Jai had shown me.The street lamps were unlit, but my enhanced vision cleared the dark easily enough, and the sky was mostly clear. The moonlight provided plenty to see by, regardless.All but one of the footsteps had stopped. The neighborhood was utterly surrounded, I knew. And I waited on the tallest rooftop, feet slanted on the tiles. I scanned the surroundings. I could see the silhouettes of a dozen men, far beyond my reach, sitting between buildings in the city proper.This sect was diseased, down to the core. Excising this small segment wouldn’t fix it. The criminals were not a symptom of the sect’s poor management; they were an extension of the sect itself, of the same rot that penetrated tot he very top of this city, and to the very top of this society.A single plodding set of food steps approached me. In the dark, talismans burned alight with arcane fire as they were thrown into the air. The talisman’s circled, pulled on a wind of qi, their golden light spilling over the street and forming a circle around the city. Beyond, the city went quiet, suppressed by the talismans, and (...)