A Chain of Schemes! The Charge Set in Stone!

He dropped to his knees with a thud and wailed, "Senior Brother Huoyun, I was wrong! I shouldn't have agreed to that old bastard's conditions!"

"But I... in a few months, I'll be over twenty-five. If I can't become a Core Disciple, I'll have to leave Songhe Gate. I don't want to leave!" He wept as though his heart had been torn apart, collapsing limply onto the ground.

With the first came the second, then the third. One disciple after another stepped out of the crowd and knelt in the center of the Alchemy Hall. Some wept bitterly, while others were ashen-faced and trembling all over.

Some of them had given Zhou Fengding silver notes. Some had offered magical artifacts, some spiritual medicines, and some had even truly agreed to those unspeakable conditions.

Their reasons came in every strange variety, but at the root of it all, there was only one—passing the assessment and becoming Core Disciples.

Li Bufan stood amid the crowd and watched coldly. He counted them. There were more than twenty in all.

These people were precisely the group whose pills had previously been of better quality.

Li Bufan sneered inwardly. Zhou Huoyun's move was truly brilliant.

Looking at the disciples kneeling all over the floor, Zhou Huoyun wore an expression of furious laughter. "Good, good, good! Elder Fengding, you truly are an old warhorse whose blade has not dulled!"

He drew a deep breath, his voice cold and stern. "This competition was unfair. Because Zhou Fengding acted on his own authority, the assessment was manipulated. Therefore, I hereby announce—the assessment is void!"

The moment those words fell, the disciples who had not bribed anyone erupted into an uproar. They had painstakingly refined pills and passed the assessment, only for all their previous efforts to go down