The enormous sand table took up more than half the hall.
It showed the current state of the Xuanhuang Small World.
At the center of the world, the vast, unsettling hollow Waghar had left behind remained lifeless and empty, a cold iron gray. Above it floated a goblet-shaped Brass Building. Slender causeways linked this Central Base of the wizards to the rest of the world, crisscrossing and stretching in every direction until they reached the world's edge.
Its edge, not its end.
The end of the world—the edge of this enormous sand table—was a void where shattered rocks drifted, swallowed by the black backdrop.
The world's edge, by contrast, was the defensive line formed by Forward Bases encircling it.
The causeways connected to that defensive line.
Together, they formed an immense, staggeringly complex Magic Array. Many of its Magic Power Nodes were already glowing faintly.
Most of the Hunting Team Captains gathered around the sand table were studying the Magic Power Nodes near their own sectors, weighing how much magical support they should request from Jiang Yu if a major battle broke out.
Xiao Xiao stood beside the sand table too.
But unlike the others, he paid no attention to the Magic Power Nodes. Holding his black, hardbound notebook, he carefully traced long, thin green lines across the page.
Those green lines represented the Golden Crow Wood Forest Belts spread throughout the Xuanhuang Small World. They crossed rolling mountains and intersecting ravines like meridians through a human body, covering the entire sand table. Pale yellow Earth Qi flowed ceaselessly along these "meridians," lending the whole model a faint breath of life.
At Matthew's question,
Xiao Xiao answered without looking up, "Perhaps."
"Perhaps?"
At that answer, not only Matthew but several nearby wizards looked up at him in surprise. After all,