While the masses seethed before Anping County's Military Academy, their blood and vitality surging like dragons and the entire county town's humanity's fortune shooting skyward like oil poured onto a raging fire.
A hundred li away, Longwind County presented an entirely different scene.
Deep underground, beneath the rear courtyard of Longwind County's County Yamen.
There stood an exceptionally well-guarded underground cultivation chamber, built exclusively for the County Magistrate.
The chamber's surrounding rock walls were densely engraved with three layers of supreme array patterns that blocked divine sense and prevented spiritual energy from escaping. They formed walls of copper and iron; not even a fly or a wisp of breeze could hope to enter that gloomy space.
Yet the air inside this isolated chamber was not stale. Instead, it was suffused with an intoxicating fragrance.
It came from golden spiritual energy—so concentrated that its sheer density had nearly condensed it into tangible droplets!
At the center of the chamber, Longwind County Magistrate Sun Bu'er sat cross-legged beside an enormous Spirit-Gathering Pool carved from a single piece of exceptionally rare supreme white jade.
The ordinary, crystal-clear spiritual liquid that had originally supplied the pool's basic spiritual power had already been thoroughly stained, turning a dazzling pure gold that emitted a faint halo!
This was not spiritual energy produced locally in Longwind County. It was the essence of heaven and earth's creation—earth vein Geng metal qi—being forcibly stolen from Anping County's earth vein in an unending stream through the Meridian-Severing Grand Array, which stretched more than a hundred li underground, like a giant whale drawing in water!
"Good! Good! Excellent!"
Sun Bu'er stared fixedly at the Spirit-Gathering Pool. The golden spiritual liquid, once no more than a shallow layer, had now risen dramatically to fill most of the pool. Rings of golden ripples