On Liang Ji's Natal Star, Dragon Soul Star.
As the City Education Bureau's reward of 'Starlight Rain' for the top fifty in the Second Mock Exam arrived, nearly ten thousand of the almost seventy thousand Zero Rank Half-Dragonfolk among the Vassals awakened their bloodlines and intelligence, advancing to First Rank.
Along with the more than five thousand First Rank Half-Dragonfolk already remaining among the Vassals, and the more than four thousand First Rank Vassals who had returned victorious from the Second Mock Exam battlefield,
the number of First Rank Vassals among the Half-Dragonfolk had now reached nearly twenty thousand, more than five thousand fewer than before the Second Mock Exam.
However, as the various mineral-vein Spirit Seeds, resource Spirit Seeds, and life-skill inheritances Liang Ji had purchased arrived, he refined them into his Natal Star and passed them on to his Vassals.
Dragon Soul Star and its Half-Dragonfolk Vassals immediately welcomed another surge of rapid development and advancement.
Only two or three days had passed in reality—the time Liang Ji needed to digest a Demon Core—yet more than a thousand years had passed on Dragon Soul Star. The wounds inflicted by the Second Mock Exam had long since healed, and the Half-Dragonfolk Vassals were flourishing once more.
East of Dragon Soul Village, the oldest and largest settlement of the Half-Dragonfolk Vassals, stretched a boundless ocean. Less than a hundred miles from shore, a trench ran for more than a thousand miles across the seafloor from north to south.
Though the trench lay beneath the sea, its temperature was not low. An underground volcanic vein ran through it, boiling the seawater with its heat. Bubbles filled the trench, along with abundant plankton and algae.
At that moment, several First Rank Half-Dragonfolk were swimming through the trench, inspecting its walls and the