The wooden wheels of Class 404’s handcart rumbled peacefully across the crushed flat stone slabs of the Grand Coliseum.
Shen Shitou pulled the front tow bar with easy, rhythmic strides, his denim overalls snapping softly against his heavy work boots. Behind the cart, Niu Mang and Murong Seven walked alongside the wooden sideboards. That kept an eye on the hard dark metal tool chests and the fifty chests of royal spirit stones gifted by Emperor Yan. Princess Jiang Ling’er walked beside Xiao Yu, helping the blind boy navigate around the piles of broken iron-hard metal rubble.
And leading the procession, resting his twenty-four-inch heavy cast-iron pipe wrench casually across his right shoulder, was Frank.
Class 404 emerged through the coliseum’s shattered eastern gate onto the broad expanse of the Central Royal Boulevard. Then, the five students suddenly stopped in their tracks.
The boulevard—a four-hundred-foot-wide ritual highway paved with spotless white marble—was fully packed from wall to wall.
Five hundred thousand people were waiting.
They weren’t shouting angrily. They weren’t demanding refunds for damaged seats, nor were they pushing against each other in chaotic mobs.
Instead, the five hundred thousand citizens of the Conferred Megacity—common weavers, tea merchants, blacksmith apprentices, wandering rogue fighters, ancient academy scholars, and tributary kings—were kneeling in neat, orderly rows along the marble curbs. In their hands, they held burning sticks of aromatic cedar incense, brass bowls of fresh well water, and bundles of newly harvested wheat.
