Several months flashed past, like a white colt glimpsed through a crack.
Ever since the empress of Daye swept through the Inner Pass and reclaimed her realm, storms had swept the world. Experts emerged one after another, taking the stage in turn and bringing the long-quiet martial world back to life. Yet no matter how newcomers sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain, the highest peaks of martial learning remained the Four Great Sacred Lands: Profound Finger Monastery, Spirit Vulture Palace, Heaven-Reaching Cliff, and Great Snow Mountain. However astonishing their talents, however brightly they distinguished themselves, newcomers who ultimately wished to glimpse the Twelve Transformations of the Mortal Realm and reach for Spirit Refining had to bow before these four sacred lands. Rumor held that the empress of Daye was the only person in countless millennia to break this precedent. Watching the tides of the Great River rise and fall, she had comprehended the supreme martial truth that "water has no fixed form, and none can contend with it." Court historians recorded the matter in detail: the empress had once disguised herself and wandered among the common people, forced to make her living as a fisherwoman, only to unexpectedly comprehend supreme martial learning, leap through the Dragon Gate in one bound, and become the youngest Spirit Refining Grandmaster of the age. Within Great San Pass, upstairs in Lion Tower, a man spoke with easy assurance:
"The twelfth transformation of the Mortal Realm is the realm of Spirit Refining. Only when one's true form converges with heaven and earth, and one's physique condenses a furnace of Qi and Blood, can one glimpse a thread of Heaven's Will, clearly perceive Original Truth, and transcend the mundane... Only the Four Great Sacred Lands possess martial teachings that record such essential secrets.
"That is