The Martial Artist's Greeting Ritual

Western Chenli, Mingjing Sect.

Unlike the outside world, semi-transparent ice-crystal snowflakes drifted down over this land, only to melt back into vapor.

As a squad of Mingjing Sect martial artists passed through the sky, shaping the clouds, the dark overcast that had blanketed the entire firmament transformed into a crystalline mirror. The snowflakes drifting down from it also became crystals like nearly transparent colored glaze. The blazing sun's heat was focused by the cloud-mirror, turning the lands around the Mingjing Sect—which ought to have been freezing—warm as spring.

Such means of remaking heaven and earth, reshaping nature's climate, were naturally for the once-a-decade True Disciple Grand Competition.

Year's end was drawing near, and the True Disciple Grand Competition was about to begin. Many disciples and true disciples who had been adventuring abroad returned from all across the Northern Frontier and even Beixuan Jizhou, while the Chenli city clusters, towns, and villages surrounding the entire Mingjing Sect also gradually came alive.

The ancient sect had ruled this land for ages, weathering countless calamities without falling. In the eyes of the Chenli tribes that had likewise endured through the long years, the Mingjing Sect was heaven, god, and order itself.

Its prosperity and decline, its joy and rage, were the prosperity and decline, the joy and rage of this land. Thus, when the Mingjing Sect announced that another grand ceremony was about to unfold, the myriad people under its jurisdiction rejoiced with fervor.

True Disciple Grand Competition was not actually its proper name.

More precisely, it was merely an important part of the Mingjing Sect's once-a-decade jiao-sacrificial grand ceremony.

During this grand sacrifice, the Mingjing Sect worshipped the patriarchs of every generation, Imperial Heaven and Earth, the Heavenly Spirits of the four directions, and the constellations of the stars, thereby obtaining the