BOOOOOOOOOOM!
The thirty-foot pillar of golden Rank 5 Early Foundation Establishment spiritual light rising from fifty-year-old rogue cultivator Old Chen’s head illuminated every single face in Myriad Pill Square!
For three full seconds, all twenty thousand injured rogue cultivators, caravan guards, and wealthy clan elders in the avenue stood frozen as if turned to stone.
Even the twenty Myriad Pill Sect town-criers holding their brass megaphones stopped mid-shout, their mouths hanging open wide enough to swallow their own fists.
Everybody in the southern mercenary guilds knew Old Chen.
Twenty years ago, when Old Chen was thirty, he had been clawed across the lower abdomen by a Rank 5 Iron-Back Bear while protecting a merchant caravan. To save his life, he had sold his family house to buy a single Rank 4 Mending Pill from the Myriad Pill Sect. Although he survived, the thirty percent toxic lead-and-cinnabar pill dregs inside the Myriad Pill Sect’s medicine had clogged three of his core dantian meridians into dead.
Stone—leaving him permanently crippled at the peak of Rank 4 Qi Gathering with zero hope of ever reaching Foundation Establishment before he died of old age!
Yet right now, standing in the middle of the street ten seconds after chewing two bouncy fruit gummy bears handed to him for free by seven-year-old Jiang Tuntun—.
