Wait—ten thousand ancient Grandmaster Souls chained to factory conveyor belts?!
Peering down through the iron ceiling grate ten miles beneath the 1,000-Sun Astral Academy, fourteen-year-old Ye Xiao raised his round spectacles—which Gu Changsheng had upgraded with a silent Care-Package Structural & Rune-Mapping Lens. Scanned the cavernous underground factory floor.
The sheer industrial cruelty of the operation was staggering.
For thousands of years across the star sectors, young cultivators had read legends about how a “Fated Chosen One” would accidentally buy a rusty thumb-ring at a flea market, rub it with a drop of blood, and awaken a mysterious, benevolent Ring-Grandpa. An ancient Rank 7 or Rank 8 Pill-Saint, Sword-Emperor, or Array-Master who would selflessly gift the boy supreme cultivation techniques, refine free pills day and night.
Eventually burn up the last drop of his remnant soul to block a fatal strike for his young host!
Everyone in the galaxy thought those Ring-Grandpas were natural accidents of fate.
Nobody knew that the 1,000-Sun Astral Protagonist Academy was running an industrial kidnapping and packaging plant that manufactured them on an assembly line!
Down on the factory floor, three thousand burly Soul-Whip Enforcers marched up. Moreover, Down beside the ten moving conveyor belts, cracking barbed purple lightning whips across the backs of the 10,000 chained ancient souls.
