Wurong County, the county yamen's rear courtyard!
The night was as black as ink, shrouding the entire county yamen in darkness. Only one elegant side room was brightly lit, its warm candlelight shining through the window paper and revealing the lean, upright figure inside.
County Magistrate Zhang Xuanming sat behind a sturdy, antique pearwood desk. He wore a simple, elegant pale-green robe, its hem neat and tidy. His manner was gentle and reserved, yet he carried the steady authority of a magistrate responsible for the people.
His eyes lowered, he held a wolf-hair brush dipped in thick black ink and bent over his work. His gaze fixed on the yellowed rice paper as he diligently reviewed documents concerning Wurong County's recent household registrations, grain-field taxes, and Martial Examination papers.
As he looked over the list of Martial Examination results before him, a glint suddenly flashed in Zhang Xuanming's eyes. A figure from today's arena rose in his mind.
"Chen An!"
He gently set down his brush and gazed through the window into the pitch-black night. Tapping the desk with his fingertip, he murmured, "Could he be a disciple of Second Master of the Shen Family?!"
Whether it was the keen instinct he had honed through years in officialdom or a Xiantian martial artist's natural sensitivity to the presence of the strong, an inexplicable unease lingered in his heart.
That county school student, whose records listed only a mid-grade Martial Bone and Qi Condensation Sixth Stage cultivation, seemed utterly ordinary—but he was not that simple.
From the ruthless, decisive, clean strike with which he had first stepped into the arena, shattering a fellow student's dantian with one palm and ruining the foundation of his entire martial path, to his subsequent rise against the odds, repeatedly defeating opponents several minor stages above