At sunrise on the eleventh morning, warm apricot-gold light spilled across the newly paved star-iron driveway and white jade staircase of Supreme Sword Mountain (Gu Family Public High School — Campus #1).
At the foot of the wide white jade steps, a vast crowd of over fifty thousand mortal farming families, blacksmiths, weavers, and poor rogue cultivators stood gathered in the morning mist. Across the other three sacred mountains and 10,000 newly opened town branch campuses, nearly ten million children and their parents waited outside the school gates at the exact same moment.
Here at the foot of Supreme Sword Mountain, the parents wore their cleanest—though heavily patched—hemp and cotton tunics, holding their seven-to-twelve-year-old children tightly by the hand.
Yet despite the joyful celebrations of the past two days. The fifty thousand farm parents stared up at the towering Nine-Hundred-Step White Jade Staircase leading into the former immortal sect’s inner halls. Not a single mortal dared to place a straw-sandaled foot onto the first white jade step!
For three thousand unbroken years, the law of the Four Great Sects had been carved into the marrow of every commoner’s bones: any. Mortal without spiritual roots who dirties the white jade steps with mud or straw sandals shall have both legs broken on the spot.
