(True) Li Lin

Hmph! Hah! Hey!

Hmph! Hah! Hey!

Early the next morning, Evenson was awakened by another burst of noisy shouting. He sat up groggily in bed, his eyes dull and his expression blank. He was clearly still half-asleep.

He mechanically turned to look at the window and found that dawn had only just begun to break. He had already been dealing with jet lag after coming from New York to Hong Kong, and he had only managed to fall asleep in the middle of the night. Now he had been woken again. He picked up his phone and checked the time. Heh, it was only 4:30 in the morning.

Sigh, I only slept for two hours? He wanted to pull the covers over his head and catch some more sleep, but the shouts outside were simply too loud for him to drift off again.

Left with no choice, he groggily climbed out of bed, got dressed, washed up, and left his room to see what these mages were doing instead of sleeping.

But the moment he stepped outside, the sight before him left him dumbfounded. A group of people stood bare-chested—well, the women wore sports bras—arrayed in neat rows across the courtyard, holding horse stances as they practiced their punches.

Their muscles bulged, their lines sharply defined, and the copious sweat running down their bodies made them gleam with oil-like sheen. Every time they threw a punch, they raised one foot high before stomping it down hard. The blue bricks beneath their feet had long since cracked layer by layer and sunk deep into the ground, showing just how profound their horse-stance training was.

Evenson stared in astonishment toward the other side. There was a large stretch of gravelly ground covered with palm-sized stones, some of them jagged and sharp-looking. Yet