Voices echoed.
Moon Gazing Tower lay in a heavy, deathly silence.
No one spoke.
After a long while.
Someone murmured softly, sounding both aggrieved and questioning. "What sort of figure is Earl Xingyi? He's merely advancing to True Image—what's so remarkable about that? Why shouldn't we compete with him?"
"Shh!"
Someone beside him tugged at his sleeve. "Earl Xingyi is only twenty-three this year!"
"No, that's not right. He isn't twenty-three." Another person shook his head and counted on his fingers. "I remember it clearly. The year Wolf Smoke became a Great Martial Master, my brother came home that same year after attending the Grand Court Assembly. He gets leave once every five years and won't return until next year. It hasn't even been four full years. He entered Hunting Tiger at eighteen and a half... This year, he should be twenty-one and a half by actual age, and he'll turn twenty-two next summer."
Twenty-one!
The person who had asked the question abruptly woke up to who exactly the Earl Xingyi mentioned by the Tower Lord was.
Several people whispered among themselves, stirring up discussions in even more small circles.
"Grandmaster Bai entered True Image at thirty... What was the youngest age for a Grandmaster in Great Qian?"
"Twenty-six exactly, four years earlier."
"Thirty to twenty-six, twenty-six to twenty-two—each four years apart. What a coincidence..."
Everyone lowered their voices. Gathered together, they buzzed and hummed, as though a swarm of bees had braved the late-autumn chill to gather honey inside the vast, empty building.
"Does anyone have the confidence to make Moon Gazing Tower break its rules for them?"
The Tower Lord spoke.
Deathly silence fell once more.
The noisy "bees" stopped their wings, landed upon flower petals, and crawled deep into the blossoms.
Forget entering True Image.
Not a