While the hidden blood-jade box hummed silently in the deep sub-solar bedrock, the morning sun rose bright, warm, and golden over the main campus of the Star-Ring.
At eight o’clock sharp the next morning, Gu Changsheng stood before the towering main archway of the academy, resting the ten-mile Rank 8 Peak Solar-Furnace Wok Spatula comfortably against his right shoulder.
Behind him stood Empress Luo Qingxue in a crisp white dean’s robe, flanked by fourteen-year-old Gu Nian, sixteen-year-old Ye Xiao. Thirteen-year-old Jiang Tuntun, twelve-year-old Su Nuannuan, toddler Little Fifth, Grandpa Fu, Auntie Qin, Grandpa Yao, and reformed Vice-Principal Qian.
High above the main gatehouse hung the original academy nameplate.
It was a massive, three-mile-wide slab of blackened abyssal dragon-bone, soaked in five millennia of dried blood and inlaid with jagged golden characters that radiated an oppressive, cutthroat aura across the plaza:
THE ONE-THOUSAND-SUN ASTRAL PROTAGONIST ACADEMY — ONLY THE CRUEL SURVIVE
For five thousand years, those arrogant words had glared down at every trembling youth who crossed the star-bridge. They had taught generations of young cultivators that kindness was a fatal flaw, that ordinary mortals were disposable stepping stones. That the only way to succeed in higher education was to step over the corpses of one’s classmates.
