The cultivators on the thousand-foot peak were indeed depressed.
Their cultivators had inadvertently learned an important piece of news. A foreign cultivator had a pass token to the secret realm of the ruins.
How this news was spread and whether it was true or not could be verified later.
The most important thing now was to find a way to control it so that other competitors wouldn't be able to seize the opportunity.
Things went smoothly. The members of the thousand feet peak easily found the cultivator and brought him back to the headquarters for interrogation.
The original plan was to grab the pass token and then kill them to silence them.
The cultivators had done such things more than once and had long been accustomed to it.
However, after the interrogation, they realized that the situation was different from what they had imagined.