The gilded signboards of the ancient sects came crashing down one after another.
At the main gates of the Jade-Clear Sect, Master Lu Jian’s construction golems swung massive iron sledgehammers. With a single thunderous blow, the ten-ton carved jade archway—which had barred commoners and mortals from entering for four centuries—crumbled into neat piles of paving gravel.
“Crush the rubble into two-inch aggregate!” Master Lu Jian ordered, waving his wooden blueprint roll. “We need road gravel for the new public bus lanes between Mountain One and Mountain Two! Don’t let good stone go to waste!”
Over the next forty-eight hours, the greatest restructuring project in continental history swept through the northern mountain ranges.
Su Wan, Master Lu Jian, and Dean Qin Haoran led three thousand municipal administrators, wood-spirit botanists, and artisan teams into the captured sect headquarters.
They did not burn the palaces. They did not loot the libraries.
Instead, they transformed them with clinical, corporate efficiency.
The dark, blood-stained torture chambers of the Jade-Clear Sect were stripped of their rusty iron cages. The floors were scrubbed with peppermint lye and lime, then fitted with clean rows of stainless-steel desks and bright daylight formations. The torture dungeon became the Taichu Department of Agricultural Soil Science.
