Entering the Hall and Reaching the Inner Chamber

Eight Rivers Province lay on the southwestern frontier of the Blood Qin Empire, the most important of the hundreds of provinces across the empire's southwestern territories.

Because the ancestral residence of Duke Xiang's family stood here. Because Blood Xiang War City, belonging to Duke Xiang's line, stood here. Because beyond Eight Rivers Province's border lay the sacred mountain where the Heavenly Temple resided; across the abyssal ravines on the sacred mountain's southwestern side was the Eastern Subcontinent—the domain of the Miro Divine Cult, the birthplace of tribal powers as intricate as the stars in the sky.

This province, as vast as three ordinary provinces combined, was named for the eight roaring rivers that ran through it before plunging from its southeastern edge into the southern seas of the Eastern Continent. It was, in the truest sense, a land of countless battles. Three to five minor clashes every year, a major upheaval every decade, an all-out war every fifty to a hundred years—over the millennia, how could the Blood Qin Empire's elite soldiers who had fallen here number merely ten million?

The line of Duke Xiang, which had established itself for two thousand years, was the highest military and political governor of these eighteen southwestern provinces. Through these ceaseless wars, it had tempered an entire family of iron-blooded men, a family of untamed, unyielding warriors.

At this moment, outside a small mountain at the very heart of Blood Xiang War City, several hundred fully armored Yue Family descendants stood solemnly. Dozens of elders silently set all manner of magic crystals into an enormous spell array before the mountain gate, while continuously pouring bucket after bucket of magic beast blood into several inlets within the array.

This small mountain was where successive Dukes Xiang had entered seclusion to cultivate. Apart from Yue