"Naturally. A Flood Dragon Feast costing hundreds of thousands of taels of silver is beyond this Hanlin Academician's means." Fang Yun walked along fanning himself, looking every inch the spirited young scholar or noble son strolling down the street.
Seeing Fang Yun act this way, everyone present instinctively breathed a sigh of relief, as though a great burden had been lifted.
After all, Fang Yun was a Void Sage!
He was a great figure with fourteen Transmissible Battle Poems to his name, someone who might become Master of the World at any moment.
Of those who had shared a deep friendship with Fang Yun back then, there were only a dozen or so, including Li Fanming, Yan Yukong, and Hua Yuqing. More than half the people here had never been especially close to him. Everyone who had entered the Sacred Ruins was a genius of his generation, and most even came from great clans. Yet now, the people who stood on equal footing with Fang Yun were the heads of those clans. Almost everyone present belonged to their grandsons' generation; there was simply no comparison.
The courtyard was full of young men in their twenties. Their grandfathers would never use Fang Yun as an example to lecture them. Instead, they used him to lecture their fathers, telling the men of that generation to learn from Fang Yun.
All these men had taken the Metropolitan Graduate Examination the previous year, and most had taken the Palace Examination alongside Fang Yun.
Early in the Palace Examination, they had thought little of it. But as the examination entered its later stages, the pressure on them had steadily mounted. When Fang Yun became the Top-Ten Zhuangyuan, they were happy for him, yet also found themselves lost.
They had all emerged from the Sacred Ruins,