Fifty pairs of young eyes settled on the white cloth spread across the floor.
Thirty-six red-ink footprints formed a fiendishly tricky arrangement, with arcs, sharp turns, and looping paths interwoven into an exquisitely intricate footwork sequence.
No one moved.
Everyone present was clever enough to have fought their way through more than three hundred competitors. They all knew what acting rashly would mean.
This was no practice session at their own ancestral headquarters. Misplacing a foot and losing face before the finest young talents under heaven was a minor matter; being eliminated from the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering outright was the real danger.
Li Xiang remained still as well.
He sat in his chair, his gaze never leaving the thirty-six footprints.
On his first examination, he studied their course and positions.
This was the Azure Dragon Looking Back Totem, but that was merely the outermost framework of the footwork. Its hidden logic went far deeper.
On his second examination, he began mentally putting himself into the sequence.
Stride length, center of gravity, the points where his soles bore weight, the muscle groups each step required, and the angles of his joints—all underwent precise calculations in his Sea of Consciousness through a process bordering on instinct.
Feng Shui Masters practiced pacing the celestial patterns and treading the Dipper, possessing a sensitivity to the smallest distances beneath their feet and the circulation of qi that was carved into their bones.
Meanwhile, a Boxer's [Coiling Dragon Tendons] and a Warrior's [Leakless Body] gave him bodily control precise down to a hair's breadth.
Together, these made footwork assessments the very thing he feared least.
Yet that only made him less inclined to rush.
Others saw thirty-six footprints. He wanted to see what Guan Yue had left within them.
Footwork personally devised by the World's