In the Immortal-Welcoming Square of Great Wall Prefecture's Prefectural City, where the Azure Ordination Heavenly Examination was being held, Anping County's thirty Black-Armored Guards, armed to the teeth, were stunning the city's powerful elites and prodigies with sheer brute force—a crushing blow from an entirely different league.
Yet their home base, Anping County, a hundred li away, had not fallen quiet with the departure of these elite troops.
Instead, this fertile land, which had just undergone a great reshuffling of its earth veins and swallowed a neighboring county's century of fortune, was nurturing jaw-dropping new wonders day and night.
Late at night, in Backwater Bend on the Three-Bath River.
A waning moon hung high, spilling cold light over the broad, shimmering river. Everything was silent except for the faint rustle of the night wind through the reeds.
Yet beneath this seemingly tranquil surface, in the dark riverbed a hundred zhang below, lay an utterly different, fantastical scene.
Clad in scarlet divine official robes, the Brook Water Earl held a gleaming Water-Splitting Stinger and led a dozen enormous aquatic shrimp soldiers and crab generals, already tamed by the County Yamen's secret arts, on a routine inspection of the water veins along the bitterly cold riverbed.
Ever since Chu Bai had established his authority with thunderous force beside the Three-Bath River, formally bestowed Edict Investiture upon him as an Orthodox God of Anping's waterways, and lavishly granted him an Enfeoffed Lord's fortune, this once timid little Water Earl's cultivation had risen like a boat on a swelling tide.
Now, he had not only shed the instability of his demonic form but firmly reached Qi Refining Great Perfection, just half a step from forming a water-phase dao foundation.
The bed of this vast, surging Three-Bath River was now his own backyard, under his