Two days, to a mighty Foundation Establishment cultivator whose lifespan easily stretched to two or three hundred years, amounted to no more than a brief moment spent meditating with closed eyes, circulating one greater celestial circuit.
Yet within the Posthouse of the Qingzhou Capital, those two days seemed to stretch without end. Every inch of air brimmed with suffocating bloodlust and fervor.
As the teleportation formations operated day and night, the prodigies taking the examination from Qingzhou's Thirty-Six Prefectures finally arrived, one after another, at this magnificent Immortal City Posthouse.
The entire Garden of Heroes occupied an immense expanse, with a world of its own within.
Pavilions with carved beams and painted pillars disappeared into spiritual mist too dense to disperse. Rare flowers and exotic plants vied in beauty, while circulating formations shut out every trace of the outside clamor. Within the Posthouse, however, an entirely different spectacle unfolded, full of treacherous undercurrents.
The age of great contention had arrived, and signs of chaos were already emerging.
The Great Zhou Dynasty's launch of the Purple Register Heavenly Examination was not merely a feast for young geniuses. For countless older cultivators, it was their only—and final—hope of turning their fortunes around.
Had anyone stood high above the Garden of Heroes and looked down, they would have discovered that the people within the Posthouse had divided into two starkly different groups.
One consisted of veteran Foundation Establishment cultivators with graying hair and withered faces, some even faintly exuding the decaying air of approaching death.
Many had been trapped at foundation establishment great perfection for decades, even a century.
Although their spell power had been refined into something incomparably profound, like a stagnant pool whose bottom could not be seen, their vital blood had begun to decline, and the erosion of time had