One hour.
Two hours.
Three hours passed.
Just as everyone's spirits sank to rock bottom, leaving them on the verge of despair.
An extremely faint ripple of spiritual power quietly spread from a girl at the rear of the group.
Like the first ripple across a deathly still lake.
She was the youngest member of the team, Li Qian, who had just turned twenty.
Her slender body trembled ever so slightly.
She had caught a strand of spiritual energy finer than a hair.
Unsteadily, she drew it into her body.
At last, it merged into her dantian.
She had done it!
Li Qian's eyes flew open, her bright gaze bursting with the wild joy of someone who had narrowly escaped disaster.
"I... I felt it! A warm current! Right in my lower abdomen!"
Her voice was quiet, yet everyone in the backyard heard her clearly.
Every gaze instantly fixed on her.
Several team members instinctively straightened their backs, their expressions conflicted. Some lowered their eyes in shame, while others stared hard at Li Qian, their breathing growing heavy.
Their captain, Zhou Yi, looked especially grim.
They practiced the Purple Thunder Heavenly Scripture, a far more domineering art focused on killing, yet they had lost to a young girl practicing a support technique?
Zhou Yi clenched his fists so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Was he, the ace of the Jiaolong Guard, unable even to reach the threshold of the cultivation of immortality?
The setting sun stretched everyone's shadows long across the backyard.
Zhou Yi and the others still had their eyes shut tight and their brows furrowed. Sweat trickled down their cheeks, soaking the collars of their training uniforms.
Meanwhile, Li Qian, the first to succeed, sat cross-legged at the rear of the group, consolidating that hard-won strand