Su Yueli strolled along the city's main thoroughfare.
The cultivators on the street hurried about, many holding palm-sized jade slips that flickered with faint light.
They seemed to be speaking into the jade slips, their voices transmitted directly across thousands of miles through formations.
These appeared to be improved versions of Sound Transmission Jade Slips. Ten thousand years ago, these expensive magical treasures had required vast amounts of divine sense to operate. Now, they had become everyday objects that mortals and low-level cultivators could readily buy.
Times had changed.
Su Yueli watched it all without much stirring in her heart.
She swept her divine sense over these so-called "clever contrivances" and instantly unraveled the principles behind their formations.
They were merely combinations of the most basic spirit-gathering and sound-transmission formations, made with inferior materials that could not withstand any real impact of spiritual power.
This prosperity, built upon fragile formations, needed only a wisp of the qi and blood pressure of the Martial Immortal Realm to make every formation in Heavenly Pivot City collapse at once.
Every spirit-powered flying vehicle would plummet from the sky and smash into scrap metal.
At that thought, Su Yueli shook her head, withdrew her gaze, and entered an old building on a street corner called the Drunken Immortal House.
It was the only tavern she had seen in the city that still retained the wooden structure of ten thousand years ago.
The paint on its sign had peeled away, bearing genuine traces of the passing years.
Su Yueli went upstairs and chose a corner seat by the window.
"What would you like, honored guest?" A waiter in a short gray tunic hurried over, holding a blank jade tablet for taking orders.
"A pot of Bamboo Leaf Green and two jin of sliced spirit ox