Early the next morning, inside the central military training grounds between Dry-Well City and Silver-Fork Port, ten thousand veteran soldiers of the Dry-Well First Army stood in neat square formations.
Every single man and woman in this ten-thousand-strong force had followed Pei Xuan since the early desert campaigns or the Black-Rock border annexation. Their Loyalty bars were all locked solidly between 92/100 and 99/100, and through daily meals of Meat-Belly Potatoes, purple spirit-rice, and night-school training, all ten thousand of them had already reached Rank 2 Peak (Bone & Blood Tempering).
However, breaking through from Rank 2 Peak to Rank 3 (Martial Grandmaster — Internal Qi)—and from Rank 3 Peak to Rank 4 (Qi Gathering — Immortal Cultivation)—normally required years of bitter meditation and thousands of Spirit Stones’ worth of medicinal herbs.
“Report to the Lord!” General Tie Zhan marched up to the review platform and saluted. “All ten thousand veterans of the First Army and five hundred elite battalion captains are assembled! Every man has memorized the Furnace-Blood Scripture backward and forward, and their blood-Qi is boiling at the very edge of a breakthrough! They only lack one big push of medicinal spiritual energy to smash open their meridians and dantians!”
