The fiery volcano bowl known as the Demon Trial Valley was crowded with more than three hundred of the southern continent’s most elite fighters.
Drawn from the Great Azure Cloud Sect, the Iron Bone Pavilion, the Flying Crane Abbey, and a dozen minor martial clans, the gathering represented the pinnacle of young talent. Prodigies clad in shimmering robes of stitched silk, silver-trimmed chainmail, and phoenix-feather tunics stood in organized clan formations across the wide dark rock plaza that stretched before the pagoda’s base.
Above them on three massive floating platforms of carved white marble sat the Sect Elders.
Dressed in flowing robes of azure and gold, these Core Formation grandmasters reclined on rosewood chairs, sipping steaming bowls of mountain mist tea. Meanwhile, their personal attendants adjusted the focus of three huge Water-Scrying Mirrors. These thirty-foot discs of enchanted liquid silver floated between the platforms, rippling with crystal-clear clarity as they prepared to broadcast the inside trials of the pagoda to the spectators below.
Grand Elder Meng of the Azure Cloud Sect, a stern-faced man with a flowing white beard and eyes like polished black glass, stood at the marble stone railing, his hands clasped behind his back.
“The decennial trial is at hand,” Elder Meng’s voice rang across the valley, amplified by spiritual force until it echoed off the fiery peaks like thunder. “For eight hundred years, our ancestors have braved the hundred floors of the Demon Pagoda to temper their Dao hearts and claim the Precursor relics of the…
