Before the bronze deep ring cooking pot could be rolled onto the center stage, four senior scroll-keepers in heavy ritual brocade marched onto Elder Gu’s rostrum.
Between them, suspended on two twelve-foot poles of polished red sandalwood, was a massive thirty-foot scroll woven from pure, shimmering golden silk.
“Gaze upon the sacred truth, mortals!” Elder Gu bellowed, sweeping his arm toward the towering banner. “See the Canonical Royal Meridian Map, personally charted by the First Sage Emperor during the ancient dawn! For thirty thousand years, every emperor, prince, and 9-Star patriarch has modeled their training upon this divine stonework!”
The silk scroll unfurled with a grand, whispering rustle that rippled across the high-sky clouds.
Painted across the fabric in brilliant red stone, crushed pearl, and liquid gold was a life-sized body diagram of a human torso.
To the untrained eyes of the hundred thousand fighters in the stands, it was a masterpiece of cosmic mysticism.
The main spiritual channels didn’t run in simple, straight paths. Instead, they twisted, turned, spiraled. Then they looped across the chest and belly in a dizzying maze of ornate, linked sharp-angled knots. Golden dragons coiled around every junction, their mouths clamping onto decorative, sharp ninety-degree corners that formed the sacred “Nine-Dragon Golden Spiral.”
