The next two days were… chaotic, to say the least.

  It actually all began rather smoothly. With the shock of the attack still weighing heavily on everyone’s minds, the initial rally behind Patriarch Ye’s actions was strong. Right after the declaration of war, he ordered the immediate arrest of any members of the Roaring Thunder Sect that had remained behind. They offered little resistance beyond verbal protests, which were naturally ignored.

  For obvious reasons, the tournament wouldn’t be continued anymore. Instead, a ceremony for the four remaining candidates was hastily thrown together where they were honored as equal victors, and the final prizes were split among them. The crowd was then disbanded.

  It was with these formalities finished, that the cracks began showing. The first thing that the new alliance tackled was setting up a command structure among themselves. Liu Wei agreed that this was the right cause of action, it was strictly necessary if they wanted to actually wage a war. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t glad that he didn’t have to be part of these negotiations though.

  It was easy to forget, seeing all of these people act so decisively and unified in declaring their support for the Parting Clouds Sect, that all of them were powerful cultivators playing leading roles in their own sects, factions and dynasties. Most of them were shrewd politicians, hardened by hundreds of years in the cutthroat world of schemes and intrigues that surrounded cultivators, many were motivated more by power than even their own, twisted moral constructs and all of them had their own interests to look out for.

  They all agreed to fight the Roaring Thunder Sect for one or more of many reasons – Xing Zhou’s ambitions were a threat, his behavior was insulting, war brought with it opportunity and everyone else was doing it – but the “how” of the matter wasn’t nearly as straightforward as one might think.

  An active war involving an alliance on this scale hadn’t been seen on the peninsula since the days when the Northern Sect Alliance was still active in more than name. Those were times of legend and lore, far removed from even the oldest of the cultivators here – nobody had any experience handling a force of this size.

  The most sensible approach from a tactical standpoint was setting up one central authority that controlled the entire force and having the Dao Contemplation Cultivators act as generals to lead these forces, executing the will of the commander. Politically, it quickly became apparent that this option was completely out of the question.

  None of the sect leaders and elders present were willing to give up command of their own sects’ members to anyone but themselves. They would bow to the will of the alliance, yes, but they would insist on remaining as intermediaries between it and their own subordinates. That effectively meant that the alliance wouldn’t be acting as a single unified army, but as roughly two dozen small ones, all differing in strength and size and each beholden to their own sect’s hierarchic arrangements.

  This would make cooperation between them more difficult as there were no unified ranks to clarify authority – many of the smaller sects, for example, employed Dao Attunement cultivators as their “elders” – and organizing them would be a nightmare. It effectively necessitated even more layers of command because one leader could not possibly keep tabs on all of these moving pieces.

  Predictably, new problems arose from this with old and recent rivalries flaring up as the sects vied for the positions of higher authority. It was, summed up in one word, a mess. And a hot one at that.

  The question of how the central command would actually look like was also not immediately apparent. On the one hand, the Parting Clouds Sect and the Serene Plains Sect were theoretically equal partners and as the grand sects they were, it was hard to imagine one of them bowing to the other’s leadership.

  On the other hand, the Parting Clouds Sect didn’t currently have a proper leader, their matriarch unconscious and not expected to wake up any time soon. Because of that, they had no one to match Tengfei Ye’s rank or his strength who could step up as a co-leader of the alliance. Things were made worse by the fact that the two sects’ good relations were mostly built upon the personal friendship of Tengfei Ye and Jinjing Liqiu. With her currently not present, the remaining elders of the Parting Clouds Sect were less willing to work with the Patriarch.

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  The ultimate compromise for that particular problem was proposed by Elder Liling Xiao who, driven by her mother’s death, had become one of the most active and resolute voices in the negotiations.

  She argued, convincingly, that it made too much practical sense for Tengfei Ye to lead them to consider anything else. He was the strongest and highest ranking among them and had proven his conviction through his actions in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt. His loyalty as a friend to Jinjing Liqiu could not be questioned and he could be trusted to treat her sect with the appropriate fairness.

  To calm the minds of her own sect, Elder Xiao proposed that a trio of their three most powerful elders should be given the power to veto any of his commands with a two to one majority. On top of that, they would be given positions immediately under his command, outranking all other members of the alliance. Once Matriarch Liqiu had awoken, this arrangement could be reformed into a dual command of the alliance.

  Somewhere in all of this chaos, the remaining sects under the Roaring Thunder Sect silently slunk away. The idea of stopping them and taking them, prisoner right here and now was floated, but ultimately shot down and buried in other conflicts. The prevailing mood was one of certainty that their alliance would be able to easily bring their enemy down, regardless of this hand of fools. There was no need to dirty their hands now and sink to the level of the Roaring Thunder Sect by violating the law of hospitality.

  Liu Wei was glad that it played out this way. With all the members, disciples and mortals around, a larger fight breaking out here would have quickly turned into a bloodbath that would have left him with no choice but to intervene even against his sect’s orders.

  Regardless, this decision naturally still ruffled a lot of feathers, especially among those sects who had feuds of their own with those they had just let go. This only added to the quarreling amongst them.

  Sometime in the late evening, the Lunar Peaks Sect’s present elders retreated from the loge to hold an impromptu council meeting to discuss their stance on the conflict. Their initial position was simply a result of Patriarch Zhao’s action – or rather lack thereof – in the moment.

  Liu Wei himself was split on the issue – the whole thing kind off fell out of the moral framework he had set himself. In his opinion, Patriarch Zhou had to be shot down, yes. His ruthless ambitions were a permanent danger to peace and stability and his goals for this war stood in direct opposition to what Liu Wei wanted for the future. Instead of equalizing the field and lifting the oppression on the people, he wanted to centralize power even further.

  However, Liu Wei was far from the warmonger he had been in the past. The new alliance was heavily favored to win this war. It might take a while, but their overwhelming force would crush Xing Zhou, regardless of his personal strength. Whether the Lunar Peaks Sect joined them or not was largely irrelevant in that regard.

  Because of that, Liu Wei’s primary concern was how many lives the conflict would take before ending. How the Lunar Peaks Sect’s involvement would play into that was hard to gauge. On the one hand, they might be able to end the war much quicker if they joined, which might reduce death tolls. On the other, they’d widen its scale even more, introducing additional chaos into an already chaotic situation. In his extensive experience, when it came to war, more chaos always equaled more deaths and more destruction.

  If pressed on the issue, Liu Wei would probably have decided to join the war. If he was involved in the alliance, he would perhaps be able to push it down the least destructive path. This was not a decision he could make alone, however and he wasn’t about to throw all of his weight behind an issue that he was still rather neutral on when there were so many other issues for which he would still need to fight in the council.

  Upon discussing it in the council, it quickly became clear that most of them supported Patriarch Zhao’s decision to remain neutral. Like Liu Wei, they all agreed in wanting to see Xing Zhao fail – though mostly for different reasons than him – but believed that the alliance would be able to accomplish that without them.

  At the back of their heads, they were probably glad to see their sect’s biggest rivals beat each other down – when all was said and done, this would almost certainly result in their own position being strengthened. They had already secured goodwill from the alliance when they had saved Matriarch Liqiu’s life – from that perspective, there was little reason to risk having to be the ones to face Xing Zhou’s terrible might directly. None of them had a particular desire to be on the receiving end of the attack they had seen unleashed today.

  In the end, the council agreed to cut diplomatic and trade relations to the Roaring Thunder Sect while keeping them open with the members of the alliance. They would express their support and deliver goods relevant to the warfare with an increased priority – though not to a decreased price – but remain nominally neutral and uninvolved in the war.

  Once they were back at the sect, they would hold a proper council meeting with all the elders, to properly reaffirm this position. It was an outcome that Liu Wei was mostly fine with.

  With that out of the way, they returned to the other cultivators. They would remain with them for the rest of the night and most of the next day, to see how things would develop, wrap up remaining diplomatic maneuvers and coordinate their own subordinate sects. In the morning, they would issue a command to their sect members and disciples to get ready to depart, which they would do some time around the afternoon.

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