In the brutal calculus of traditional immortal training, there was an ancient maxim that every sect patriarch taught his students from their very first breath. Before total strength, all tricks and stratagems are mere dust.
For the first fifty-nine floors of the Thousand-Floor Celestial Pagoda, the “Five Retired Fishing Gentlemen” appeared to be living, breathing proof of that ancient truth.
They didn’t formulate balanced party compositions. They didn’t appoint a stalwart vanguard to absorb moving impacts, nor did they designate a patient wood-element healer to mend cut spirit veins. They were five peak Nascent Soul grandmasters whose combined training age exceeded fifteen hundred years.
When a pack of fifty shadow-thorn wolves ambushed them on Floor 12, Grand Elder Song Yun didn’t raise a shield. He merely flicked his linen sleeve. A storm of formless sword qi reduced the phantom beasts to sparkling blue dust before they could even growl. The rushing whirlpools of Floor 30 tried to spin them into the rapids. Then, Old Monster Iron-Bone snorted contemptuously, stomping his foot to freeze the entire river into solid ice with raw brute force. Even Xiao Hei’s lunar phantom on Floor 50 was met by three overlapping domain barriers that forced the sky wolf to yield through sheer spiritual pressure.
