Next, everyone followed the eight examiners into the cave.
The eight examiners were clearly all warriors. Their bodies moved with a fluid, coordinated grace as they walked.
There were probably about as many warriors in all of Dongning City as there were here.
But in Ningzhou, this many people had been sent out just to oversee one exam.
Thanks to better education, infrastructure, and medical care, big cities often siphoned talent away from the surrounding areas. Warriors, rare in Dongning, were not exactly everywhere in Ningzhou, but there were a hundred times as many, perhaps even several hundred times as many.
The cave was enormous. By a rough estimate, it covered tens of thousands of square meters, like a giant plaza.
On each side were four armored personnel carriers and a medium tank, parked facing each other. Five soldiers stood guard near every vehicle, clearly prepared for any emergency.
A faint smell of gunpowder seemed to linger in the air.
As the crowd reached this point, their voices instinctively grew quieter, and the atmosphere became somewhat oppressive.
People who lived in peacetime had hardly ever seen a scene like this.
Those grim cannon barrels made people worry that they might suddenly unleash a terrifying attack and tear the crowd to pieces.
Chen Shouyi looked away. That was when he noticed a huge iron gate at the far end of the plaza, with four fully armed soldiers standing at attention beside it.
The passageway was probably inside.
One of the examiners stepped forward and handed over a pass and a document.
The soldier looked them over, flipped through a few pages, saluted, then pressed the button beside him. With the sound of an electric motor turning, the iron gate slowly parted, revealing a passageway.
The passageway was six or seven meters