Winter had descended upon Anping Outer City.
Beneath a lead-gray sky, great flakes of snow drifted down over Qingzhou like torn willow fluff.
Yet beneath Anping County's magnificent outer walls, which stretched for dozens of miles, there was not a trace of winter's deathly stillness. Instead, work raged on in a feverish scene that bordered on brutal.
This was Anping County's most unusual camp—the Vanguard Camp.
Made up of several thousand rogue cultivators from elsewhere, this camp was currently performing the hardest, most exhausting, and most dangerous heavy labor in all of Anping County.
"Straighten your damned backs! Haven't you eaten? This piece of azure astral rock weighs over twenty thousand jin! If you chip so much as a corner, I'll pull out your bones and use them to fill the gap!"
At the foot of the wall, Pang Song, deputy director of the Demon-Suppression Office, stood with his granite-like, knotted upper body bare, letting the falling snow melt into white mist against his burning skin.
He held a long whip refined from the tendons of a high-grade Qi Refining demon beast braided with blazing copper wire. Like a wrathful vajra guardian, he roared at the men below.
Before him stood a full two hundred Qi Refining cultivators, their clothes ragged and their bodies drenched in sweat.
These rogue cultivators, who had once stood high above ordinary people and regarded them as ants, now had most of the spell power in their dantians sealed, leaving only their instinctive ability to circulate blood and qi.
Thick hauling ropes cut across their shoulders, biting deep into their flesh. Chanting in unison, they dragged a massive block of azure astral rock inch by inch along an ice-and-snow-covered slide toward the formation hub in the wall.
"One, two, pull!"
Amid a hoarse roar, a