In the mortal training realm of the Jiuzhou Plane, a breakthrough was supposed to be a terrifying, life-or-death trial.
Ancient manuals dictated that when a fighter tried to break past the Ninth Tier to reach the legendary realm of a 9-Star Saint, they must prepare for seven decades.
They had to bathe in spiritual dew, swallow nine thousand nine-colored soul-pills, build thirteen spirit-gathering formations, and sever every lingering earthly desire. Even then, nine out of ten aspirants were reduced to piles of smoking ash by the backlash of their own unruly spirit veins.
Lu Zhen was doing none of that.
He was standing in his high-vis safety vest. He leaned against a stack of gold metal bars, drinking lukewarm stone water from a plastic squeeze bottle.
Then, deep behind his belt buckle, something went pop.
It wasn’t a painful sensation.
It felt remarkably like the satisfying click of a plastic snap-on tool case closing shut, or the dull thud of an automatic signal shifting smoothly into fifth gear on an open highway.
