If the Red River was the Alliance's first physical wound, the "Great Silence" was its first stroke of madness.
In the city of Wuhan, the heart of the Murim Alliance's administrative power, High Lord Jo Mu-Sang paced the length of the Inspection Court. The room was designed for clarity—white stone walls, open windows, and a central table that should have been buried under a mountain of reports. Instead, the table was bare.
"Explain this," Mu-Sang said, his voice dangerously thin. He looked at the two men standing before him.
The first was the Head of the Beggar Sect, a man whose rags were supposedly worth a king's ransom in secrets. The Beggar Sect was the "Orthodox" eye, an army of a million paupers who occupied every street corner in the Central Plains. The second was the Master of the Hao Clan—the "ignoble clan" of prostitutes, gamblers, and street-rats who controlled the underworld's information flow.
"My Lord," the Beggar Master whispered, his hands trembling against his bamboo staff. "It is as if the West has simply... vanished. Three hundred of my most experienced 'Flower-Rank' spies crossed into the Anhui border three days ago. Not a single one has sent a carrier pigeon. Not a single secret signal has been scratched onto a tavern wall."
The Hao Clan leader nodded, his face pale. "My people in the brothels and tea houses are reporting a ghost-wind. They say that whenever they try to discuss the Yun movement, the air in the room grows heavy. Some have even reported hearing a faint, crystalline hum—like a bell ringing in their very dantians—before they lose consciousness."
What the Alliance leaders didn't understand was that they were no longer fighting a war of manpower. They were fighting against the Heaven-Eye Network.
At that very moment, atop the highest pavilion of the Yun estate, a young woman named Hao-Ran—a defector from the very clan now failing the Alliance—sat in a state of deep "Ethereal Enlightenment". She didn't have a map. She didn't need spies. She was practicing the Eternal Transformation stage of the Nature Realm.
Through her synchronization with the Universal Origin Scripture, she had turned the atmosphere itself into a sensory organ. At this stage, a master could hear "Sound-Transmissions" across hundreds of miles, vibrating the air molecules to detect the heartbeat of a hidden assassin or the rustle of a coded letter in a beggar's pouch.
"Target identified," Hao-Ran whispered. Her eyes were closed, but she 'saw' the world as a web of golden vibrations. "A Beggar Sect messenger is three miles from the Hubei border, hidden in a charcoal cart."
She didn't move. She simply adjusted the frequency of the air around the messenger.
Three miles away, the beggar suddenly felt his internal Ki stagnate. The air around him became a vacuum, then a crushing weight. He didn't see a Yun warrior; he simply fell into a deep, forced sleep as the scroll in his hand disintegrated into ash, rewritten by a remote "Slash Projection" of pure intent.
This was the "Intelligence Vacuum." The Alliance was a titan whose optic nerves had been severed. Jo Mu-Sang sent orders for the "Silver Vow" to march, but the orders arrived at empty garrisons. He demanded maps of the Yun's defenses, but the maps he received were of territories that had changed overnight through "Spatial Manipulation".
"The Yun are not just attacking our borders," Jo Mu-Sang realized, looking out at the darkened city. "They are erasing our reality."
In the tea houses of Henan, the talk of "Orthodox Justice" had died out. The commoners—the "3rd Rate" laborers who were usually the Hao Clan's silent prey—were now looking toward the West with a strange, quiet hope. They had heard the whispers in the wind. They had heard that under the Yun, even a street-rat could learn to hear the sky.
The Murim Alliance was still the largest organization in the world, with a million swords at its beck and call. But as the sun set over Wuhan, those million swords were held by men who no longer knew where to point them. The sky had been partitioned, and the Alliance was finally, truly blind.