Great Wall Prefectural City, the plaza outside the Astronomical Bureau.
The Azure Ordination Heavenly Examination, held once every five years, had finally drawn to a close.
The vast plaza, paved with a single slab of white chalcedony and large enough to hold a hundred thousand people, was already packed beyond passage with representatives of the counties' aristocratic clans and sect outposts, along with countless rogue cultivators waiting with craned necks.
The cultivation world's rules were stringent, its class divisions ironclad.
No matter how profound a Qi Refining cultivator's spell power became, if they could not endure the Heavenly Examination's final trial, they would remain nothing more than an insignificant ant.
Yet creation's bounty was finite, and the earth veins' turbid baleful energy was incomparably violent. The Foundation Establishment success rate in past examinations had always been a horrifyingly cruel "not one survivor in a hundred."
On the raised platform, three Astronomical Bureau examiners in star-and-moon robes sat behind a great bronze desk.
The man in the center had snow-white hair and beard, with wisps of purple qi curling faintly around him. He was unmistakably an exalted Purple Abode Realm cultivator.
"The hour has come." The chief examiner, Shen Xuance of the Purple Abode Realm, slowly opened his eyes. His voice was quiet, yet it boomed like mighty bronze bells beside a hundred thousand ears at once, instantly silencing the clamor.
He swept his broad sleeve, and the Water-Moon Mystic Light Mirror that had hovered overhead for months suddenly rang with a clear sword-like note. Gold and azure runes then poured from its surface like a waterfall, swiftly condensing into large characters in midair.
Tens of thousands of pairs of eyes instantly turned bloodshot, staring fixedly at that curtain of light.
The first to appear was the [Azure Ordination Ranking], which