Not long afterward.
The Continental Advanced Soul Master Academy Elite Tournament opened in grand fashion!
In name, the tournament was a grand event hosted by the two great empires and co-organized by Spirit Hall. In reality, it was a covert struggle between the three great powers, using the opportunity to recruit talent and expand their strength.
After all, the continent had a population of tens of millions, yet the number of Soul Masters had never reached six figures. Even with Spirit Hall's long heritage, it controlled fewer than half of them.
The continent's top trending topic this year was the Heaven Dou Empire's decision to give up its guaranteed spot and fight its way into the Finals through its own strength.
It had been too embarrassed to proclaim that it would win the championship. After all, the bitter lessons of the past were right there. The fear was that its words might jinx it and it would fail again in the end. If that happened, the Heaven Dou Empire might as well disappear.
On the Heaven Dou City side, there were six Preliminary Tournament divisions in total. With no guaranteed spot, those six divisions would compete for seventeen tournament berths.
Heaven Dou City had many Soul Master academies and seven qualifying spots. The other four kingdoms and the duchy each had two qualifying spots per division. Things were much the same on the Star Luo Empire's side.
Over a hundred academies would compete for just a dozen or so spots; the intensity of the competition was easy to imagine. With such a packed schedule, they should reasonably have recruited more substitutes to rotate in, but Lin Qian found that too troublesome and flatly refused.
Besides himself, wasn't Gu Yuena there to back them up? After freeloading so many resources, it