The Mingcui Valley had never been as famous and as crowded as that day.
The people had flooded the banks of the shallow stream and the valley, and human figures were everywhere. The noise from their footsteps and conversations made a huge hubbub throughout the valley.
The magic guards of the imperial court blocked the two ends of the ten mile-long valley. The light glinting from their fearsome swords and magic treasures shot upwards, and reflected against each other in the sky.
It had become a forbidden land here.
More than ten thousand soldiers and hired hands were searching the fields and mountains for the tiniest clues across an area of seventy square miles.
Officials from the Pure Heaven Bureau were investigating a few key spots.
People dressed in official uniforms could be seen in the ruins of the Daoist temple by the stream and under a wild tree at the deepest end of the valley.