The afternoon sun cast long, amber shadows across the central plains as the Tranquil Ripple arrived over a sprawling compound of white stone pavilions and curved cedar gables.
Surrounded by weeping willows, blooming peach groves, and green sports grounds stood the Central Plain Academy of Combined Arts.
Founded during the golden reforms following the pacification of the central plains, the academy had been established upon the ruins of the Iron Halberd Military Castle. A grim citadel where warlords once bred slave beast-gladiators and trained child-soldiers for territorial conquest. In those brutal days, mortal children were taught to slit the throats of wolf-kin without flinching, and beastfolk cubs were kept in barbed iron cages until their spirits were broken.
Today, there were no cages, no iron collars, and no barbed barricades.
The wide courtyard gates stood open to the summer breeze. From the classroom pavilions came the melodic chime of small bronze bells signaling the afternoon recess. Within moments, the open grassy lawns filled with a joyous eruption of high-pitched voices, pounding feet, and ringing laughter.
Lin Xiao peered over the cedar gunwale in his semi-clear sapphire slime form, his white curved eyes crinkling into happy crescents.
“Look at that lawn, Ling’er,” Lin Xiao murmured, his voice bubbling with delight. “In my old world, parents would pay twenty thousand silver pieces a semester just for a school with that much open grass.”
