The next morning, as the sky had only just begun to brighten, Shrek City was still shrouded in a thin veil of morning mist.
Xiao Cheng got up early. After washing up, he changed into a sleek set of black fitted clothes. Standing before the mirror, he adjusted his collar and studied the youth reflected there—tall and straight-backed, his features already beginning to carry a heroic air. He nodded in satisfaction.
"Testing our stats today..." He stretched, his bones crackling, and a curve lifted at the corner of his mouth. "I wonder if my results will scare them."
He left home, bought several steamed buns and a cup of soy milk from a roadside stall, and headed toward the Spirit Pagoda while eating.
There were not many pedestrians on Shrek City's streets that early in the morning, only elderly people out for exercise and vendors hurrying to the morning market. Xiao Cheng chewed on a bun as he mentally went over the day's testing schedule.
By the time he reached the Spirit Pagoda's training ground, the others had already arrived one after another.
The training ground was located on the third basement level of the Spirit Pagoda headquarters. It covered over a thousand square meters, with a dome more than ten meters high—enough to accommodate battles at the Soul Saint level. The floor was laid with specially made alloy, while the walls were inscribed with densely packed soul-tool runes capable of absorbing and cushioning the aftershocks of combat, preventing damage to the building.
Along the eastern side of the training ground stood a complete set of high-end, precision soul-tool assessment equipment: a hydraulic sensor tester for accurately measuring force, a circular sprint track precise to the millisecond, flash-response targets that captured reactions down to the microsecond, a high-precision mental power