Looking again at the bustling crowd around them, the two men who had followed everyone here suddenly felt out of place.
"Why are you shoving? In a hurry to be reincarnated? Line up in four rows and pass through in order. One per person. Take it!"
The armored soldiers at the exit stood in five rows, dividing those emerging into four lines leaving the gate and continuously handing each person a medium-sized black cloth pouch.
Above the passage, armored soldiers on the battlements also took turns calling out, "These black cloth pouches are the specially made Lightproof Pouches marked in the illustrated guides you received. They're for storing insect core crystals. Insect core crystals must not be exposed to light; the moment they see light, they'll escape. They only settle down in a lightproof environment.
"There's a Mother-Child Talisman inside each pouch, temporarily requisitioned from the Royal Court's personnel. These things are very expensive and must be returned after the assembly. Many of you may never have used one. If you don't know how, consult the illustrated guide you were given. It has instructions, and so do the rules."
After receiving his pouch, Shi Chun walked along with the line, pulled its mouth open, and took out something resembling a palm-sized bronze mirror, patterned with divisions of yin and yang. One side was rough, the other smooth as a mirror, but it was pitch-black and could not serve as a mirror.
He had read the illustrated guide and knew that it could be split in half. Giving the other half to the person one needed to contact allowed both parties to communicate over a distance. If one was inside a barrier and the other outside, however, it would stop working. Apparently, a barrier had been set up around this Contest