“First Elder Jian Wuchen?!”
Up on the stone stairs of Mount Azure, six thousand Azure-Sword disciples craned their necks and gasped in unison.
Even Second Elder Gu and Third Elder Mei up on the cliff terrace rubbed their eyes three times to make sure they weren’t seeing an illusion array.
Two months ago, when First Elder Jian Wuchen had led three thousand elite flying-sword disciples down the mountain to attack Pei Xuan’s border, he had been a skinny, sour-faced old man with hollow cheeks, dark circles under his eyes, and an old hidden lung injury caused by thirty years of breathing cold metallic Sword Qi on top of Mount Azure’s snowy peak. Back then, whenever Jian Wuchen gave a morning lecture, he had to cough into a silk handkerchief every five minutes.
Yet look at the man standing in front of the steamrollers now!
Jian Wuchen’s face was rosy and smooth, without a single sickly wrinkle left on his forehead. His silver hair was tied back under a clean yellow hard-hat, and the sleeves of his robe were rolled up past his elbows, revealing bronzed forearms corded with iron-like muscles that bulged as he held a five-hundred-pound Golden-Grade Fused Trenching Shovel with one hand!
