In the blink of an eye, fifty years had quietly slipped by.
Fifty years was enough for a newborn baby to grow into a steady, middle-aged adult.
Enough for a spirited young man to enter old age, his hair and beard turned white.
And enough for a struggling empire to be reborn and shine with a brilliance it had never known before.
Such was the Great Sui Dynasty now.
Under Lin Hanzhou's iron-fisted rule, the three new policies that had once stirred up a storm had long since become deeply woven into the Great Sui's very bones.
Chang'an, the Capital City, was no longer the place it had been ten years ago.
Its streets had been widened and cleaned, with shops lining both sides, their wares dazzling to the eye.
Hu merchants from the Western Regions led their camels in, bringing rare and precious treasures.
Fleets from the Eastern Sea delivered fresh seafood.
Merchants traveling north and south had turned the city into a hub for the wealth of the entire realm.
The people wore fine clothes and smiled with confidence and contentment. The numbness and misery of old were nowhere to be seen.
Across the country, the problem of land concentration that had plagued dynasties for generations had been fundamentally resolved.
The people lived in peace and prosperity, and the Great Sui's treasury was full.
With improvements to irrigation and farming tools, the Great Sui's grain output could even sustain the population growth of the coming decades.
But the changes with the most far-reaching impact were those in education and talent.
Over the course of fifty years, tens of thousands of government schools had been established throughout the country.
Free elementary education meant that literacy was no longer the privilege of the nobility.
Countless children from common families changed their fate through this path.
The new imperial examinations also selected large numbers of practical, capable officials for the empire.
They replaced the corrupt old bureaucrats, flowing like a fresh stream into every part of the empire.
This kept the entire machinery of state running efficiently and cleanly.
Lin Hanzhou had not neglected military preparedness, either.
He established the Royal Martial Arts Academy and promoted these body-tempering techniques on a large scale among both the army and the people.
These techniques all came from basic body-tempering methods in the Blue Star world.
Promoting them greatly improved the people's physiques without creating too many innate martial artists among the common folk.
After fifty years, the overall strength of the Great Sui army had risen by more than a single grade compared to what it had been fifty years earlier.
The clearest proof came in the war against the northern nomads thirty years ago.
At that time, a prodigy had risen out of nowhere, successfully unifying the entire north and establishing the Liao Kingdom.
After consolidating all the resources of the north, the Liao Kingdom's strength reached an unprecedented peak.
That was precisely what made them grow ever more arrogant, until they set their sights on the Great Sui Dynasty.
They had long coveted the rich lands of the Great Sui.
And so, an army of four hundred thousand Liao troops marched south in a mighty tide, heading straight for the Great Sui's borders.
How could the Great Sui fail to notice the Liao army's menacing advance?
Upon learning of the news, Lin Hanzhou personally led an elite force of one hundred thousand to the border.
In that battle, the Great Sui army crushed the Liao forces outright. More than half of their four hundred thousand troops were lost, and the rest fled north in disarray.
But it didn't end there. Lin Hanzhou had no intention of letting them off so easily. He pursued the retreating enemy, leading his army north.
The Great Sui army swept forward like a breaking bamboo, fighting its way all the way to the gates of the Liao capital.
The Liao emperor panicked and hurriedly sent envoys to sue for peace.
But Lin Hanzhou paid them no mind and ordered his army to attack the city.
In the end, the Liao Kingdom, once master of the entire north, was destroyed, and the whole region became the Great Sui's backyard.
After that battle, Lin Hanzhou's prestige soared like the midday sun, both among the troops and among the people.
The people spontaneously built shrines in his honor, hailing him as the "Enlightened Sage Emperor"—a wise and sagely ruler who had ushered in a shining age of prosperity.
The writers and scholars of the age set his name to verse, storytellers in teahouses spun it into legend, and people throughout the realm passed it from mouth to mouth.
As the architect of all this, Lin Hanzhou had not neglected his own cultivation over the past fifty years.
In the secret chamber of the Heart Nourishing Hall, Lin Hanzhou sat cross-legged.
His breathing was long and steady. With every breath, he seemed to merge with the pulse of heaven and earth.
Threads of spiritual energy from heaven and earth streamed in from all directions, pouring into his body.
Besides that, an even more mysterious golden "fortune" swirled around him.
That golden fortune was the manifestation of the Great Sui Dynasty's national fortune.
As the absolute ruler of the dynasty and the focus of the people's faith, he had long since formed an inseparable bond with this land and realm.
That bond allowed him to freely draw upon the national fortune of the Great Sui Dynasty.
If he wished, he could even use the power of the national fortune to raise his cultivation straight to the third tier.
But if he did that, he would become completely bound to the Great Sui Dynasty.
If the Great Sui Dynasty fell later, his cultivation would fall with it.
More importantly, if he left the Dream World, the cultivation granted by the national fortune would vanish as well.
Therefore, Lin Hanzhou could only buckle down and cultivate on his own.
But after cultivating for fifty years, he had only reached the peak of the Pulse Opening Realm.
His cultivation was so slow partly because of his terrible aptitude, but the spiritual energy in this world was also to blame.
Over the years, Lin Hanzhou had learned that spiritual energy had only recently begun to revive in this world.
That was precisely why spiritual energy here was so thin.
Here, ordinary martial artists needed medicinal herbs to break through to the innate stage, let alone advance beyond it.
Compared to the real Blue Star, this place was heaven and earth apart.
If he had spent this long cultivating on Blue Star, he would have reached at least the second-tier Qi Gathering Realm, if not the third-tier Qi Sea Realm.
"Damn it, what kind of cultivation environment is this? The place with the densest spiritual energy here can't even compare to a toilet over on Blue Star."
Lin Hanzhou slowly opened his eyes, grumbling under his breath.
He felt the spiritual power in his body surging like rivers and seas, yet he felt not the slightest joy.
Over the past fifty years, he had cultivated bitterly through countless days and nights, with the resources of an entire dynasty poured into him, and still he had only just reached the peak of the Pulse Opening Realm.
He had thought that reaching the peak of the Pulse Opening Realm would let him break through into the second-tier Qi Gathering Realm, but he had been mistaken.
Because of his D-grade aptitude, his efficiency at absorbing spiritual energy was abysmally low.
On top of that, spiritual energy was already scarce in this world, so he had never been able to break through to the Qi Gathering Realm.
He had tried several times, but each attempt failed because he hadn't converted enough spiritual power.
Fortunately, the spiritual power of the Luo Heaven Art was gentle, so failed breakthroughs had little effect on him. Otherwise, he would probably have returned to reality by now.
"Forget it. There's no need to rush. I still have plenty of time. If it comes to it, I'll go back and break through there."
Thinking this, Lin Hanzhou felt more at ease. He rose to his feet and walked out of the secret chamber.
Fifty years had left their mark on him.
He had gone from a young man to a steady, reserved middle-aged man, and a monarch's natural authority now rested in his features.
He pushed open the hall doors, and warm sunlight fell across him.
Looking out at the prosperous world beyond the palace, he knew he had already accomplished most of what he had set out to do in this world.
Next came the waiting: waiting for an opportunity to break through, or for the system to settle his rewards.
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