Within seven days of the Thousand-Floor Pagoda opening its sky bronze gates, the entire martial fabric of the Azure Cloud Realm was turned fully inside out.
For five thousand years, traditional training sects had followed a rigid, ancient doctrine. A student’s life was meant to be solitary, austere, and dangerous. You sat cross-legged in a damp limestone cave for thirty years. He stared at a mossy wall until your joints rusted, sometimes emerging to murder a fellow fighter over a three-hundred-year-old snow lotus. Swordsmanship was taught with lethal arrogance. Strike first, strike to kill, and never trust a man who walked beside you.
Now, that entire five-millennium tradition lay in smoldering ruins, replaced by a feverish, continent-wide obsession with team synergy, aggro control, and optimal party composition.
In the artisan quarter of the floating safe hall, Old Man Tie Shan stood outside his huge fiery forge shop, his massive eight-foot frame covered in soot as he leaned upon his star-iron arm. Behind him, thirty bear-beastman apprentices were hammering glowing metal bars of meteor-iron on anvil blocks that rang with ear-splitting rhythm.
A wild elder from the Heavenly Blade Sect waved a heavy sack of spirit jade in Tie Shan’s face.
