The four female elders looked at each other.
The expression that moved between them was not simple. It was the layered, compressed expression of women who had cultivated for centuries, who had political instincts sharpened to fine edges by decades of sect hierarchy navigation, and who were now standing in a hall that smelled of blood and pheromones with a naked Immortal Emperor's cock-print still fresh on their sect master's cheek.
The youngest among them — Elder Fanxue, barely two hundred years in cultivation, her face carrying the preserved appearance of a woman in her mid-thirties despite the cultivation years behind it — went rigid.
Her robes were soaked dark at the shoulders.
Her eyes moved to Tianlong with the wide, involuntary attention of someone who had just registered that a sentence containing the phrase 'yet to be deflowered' had been directed in her general direction.
Her mouth opened.
"I —" she started.
