“A barren garden with overgrown weeds and crumbling pavilions!”
Across Central Scholar Avenue, Provost Sima Heng stood on his academy’s high watchtower, his mocking voice roaring through an amplification horn array.
“Lin Mo, you bought a patch of dirt, so what?! Do you think an immortal academy is just a wall and a gate?! It takes fifty years to quarry deep-sea Star-Marble! It takes fifty years to calibrate Time-Dilation Cultivation Pagodas! You have no classrooms, no dormitories, and no heating arrays! Your ten thousand turnip-diggers will freeze in muddy tents tonight! In five days, they will be too sick with frostbite to hold an exam brush!”
Beside Sima Heng, dozens of aristocratic students leaned over the battlements, banging brass wine flagons and laughing mockingly at the open parkland across the street.
Inside the newly acquired Lotus Garden, Dean Yan Shouzhen looked around with a furrowed brow.
The garden was indeed massive, filled with ancient pines and frozen ponds, but the previous dynasty’s wooden pavilions had rotted from two centuries of neglect. Cold wind whistled through broken roof beams, scattering dead leaves across the dirt.
“Chairman Lin,” Dean Yan murmured, adjusting his robes. “Sima Heng’s words are malicious, but he is correct about the logistics. Setting up basic living quarters for ten thousand students normally takes at least three years of heavy labor.”
