Chapter 24: The Sect’s Training Camp

Time flowed like water, unhurried and quiet. Two years slipped away in the blink of an eye.

Xiao Yifeng was now fifteen. He had stretched out, his frame shedding its childish softness for the lean muscle of youth. He now stood half a head taller than Su Miaoqing.

Su Miaoqing, at sixteen, had truly blossomed. The awkwardness of childhood had melted away, replaced by the graceful curves of a young woman. Yet, despite her maturing figure, her demeanor toward Xiao Yifeng hadn’t changed in the slightest. She clung to him with the same innocent intimacy as before, much to the eternal headache of her mother, Lin Ziyun, who tried in vain to teach her about the propriety between men and women.

Over these two years, Xiao Yifeng had burned through the Spirit Stones he had obtained from Mo Tianqing with reckless abandon. He spared no expense in his cultivation. The result was consistent progress: one layer per year.

He now stood at the seventh layer of Qi Condensation.

For someone with his mediocre aptitude—roughly equivalent to a third-grade talent—this speed was respectable. It was enough to make Su Qianyi and the other elders nod in satisfaction.

Su Miaoqing, however, was a true prodigy. In the same span of time, she had reached the Grand Perfection of Qi Condensation. Her cultivation base was overflowing; she could no longer suppress it. She urgently needed to break through to Foundation Establishment.

Recently, Su Qianyi and his wife had been frantic, preparing for their daughter’s next step.

Foundation Establishment was divided into three tiers: Human Path, Earth Vein, and Heavenly Path. Naturally, for a genius like Su Miaoqing, they wouldn’t settle for anything less than the Heavenly Path.

But there was a problem. Wuya Hall was broke.

The resources required for a Heavenly Path Foundation Establishment were astronomical, and the Hall was so strapped for resources that gathering even a single set of materials was proving difficult.

Xiao Yifeng watched this unfold with a heavy heart. In his previous life, he had been young and muddle-headed, oblivious to the sect’s finances. But now, with the eyes of experience, he sensed the bizarre abnormality of it all.

Wuya Hall was one of the major powers of the Wentian Sect. Su Qianyi was a Mahayana stage expert—a titan of the cultivation world. For such an entity to be financially destitute was absurd. It was like seeing a wealthy landlord dressed in silk but unable to afford a single copper coin for tea.

He knew, of course, that Wuya Hall had been in an awkward decline for years. As one of the nine great halls, it consistently ranked at the very bottom.

Since Xiao Yifeng’s entry, Su Qianyi hadn’t managed to recruit a single new disciple during the annual selections. The intake numbers across the entire sect were low—barely over eighty a year—but for a Hall Master to come home empty-handed year after year was humiliating.

In the last decade, Xiao Yifeng was the only disciple to join.

It was a starvation-style vicious cycle. Without new blood, there was no future. Soon, Wuya Hall wouldn’t even have enough bodies to field a team for the Sect Grand Competition.

The roots of this rot went deep.

First, the Great War between the Righteous and Evil factions a thousand years ago had devastated the hall. Elder Mo Tianqing had fought desperately, but the casualties were catastrophic. Wuya Hall’s strength plummeted, instantly relegating it to the weakest of the main branches.

But the true collapse happened under the tenure of the previous Hall Master, True Person Qingxu, who succeeded the legendary Wuyazi.

Qingxu had been desperate to revitalize the hall. He abandoned quality for quantity, accepting disciples indiscriminately. The hall became a chaotic mess of mixed backgrounds and questionable morals.

Then came the final blow. Qingxu, facing the end of his lifespan and frustrated by his disciples’ lack of progress, failed to pass down the legacy. Instead, he mysteriously disappeared, taking countless rare treasures of Wuya Hall with him.

Most fatally, he took the hall’s guardian treasure, the Mo Xue Sword, and the supreme inheritance scroll.

With the master gone and the legacy severed, the disciples turned on each other. Civil war erupted. They fought over the scraps of power, killing each other in a frenzy of greed.

It was Su Qianyi, alongside Lin Ziyun, who ended the chaos. They paved a road of blood, using thunderous methods and the strong external backing of the Luoshu Mansion to purge the dissenters.

They saved the hall, but the cost was terrible. The hall’s vitality was shattered. There was no one to bridge the gap between the old generation and the new.

Worse than the death of disciples was the loss of knowledge. The supreme techniques were gone. No matter how painstakingly Su Qianyi tried to reconstruct the lost arts, his patchwork versions could never compare to the original, meticulously refined techniques of the ancestors.

Even the Eldest Senior Brother, talented as he was, lagged behind the elites of other halls because his inheritance was incomplete.

No disciples meant no income. A behemoth like Wuya Hall required massive funding to operate, and the coffers were empty.

The deficit was undeniable. Over the past two years, Su Qianyi’s face had grown grimmer by the day. He had even publicly quarreled with other Hall Masters during the recent induction ceremony, his frustration boiling over.

Xiao Yifeng saw it all. The situation was precarious, a fog of uncertainty settling over the mountain. But with his current low strength, he was powerless to stop the slide.

To avoid repeating the tragic fate of his previous life, he could only double down. He had to cultivate. Only absolute strength could change destiny.

One day, as Xiao Yifeng was deep in meditation, his Eldest Senior Brother came to find him.

The young man looked hesitant, shifting his weight awkwardly.

“Little Feng,” he began, his voice tinged with embarrassment. “The sect has a rule. Every September, all disciples who reach the seventh layer of Qi Condensation must participate in the Enforcement Team training camp. It lasts for three years, serving as both experience and a mandatory mission.”

He paused, looking pained. “You’ve reached the seventh layer. By law, you should have reported in already. But… Mistress said the Enforcement Team is a snake pit—a mixed bag of good and bad—and she’s been blocking the order to protect you. But the training camp started three months ago, and the other halls are applying pressure. I…”

Xiao Yifeng blinked, the memory surfacing. “I’ve caused trouble for you, Senior Brother. I completely forgot about the Enforcement Team. Please, put your heart at ease. I’ll speak to Mistress myself. I’ll report for duty tomorrow.”

Relief washed over the Eldest Senior Brother’s face. He quickly pulled a token and a flying Magical Artifact from his Storage Ring.

“I’m glad you understand, Little Feng. Mistress… well, convincing her is up to you. I really have no choice in this. Here is your Enforcement Token. Go to the Enforcement Hall tomorrow to register and collect your uniform and weapons.”

Xiao Yifeng took the heavy token. The words Enforcement Team were embossed on the front, and Yi-Hai Twenty-Nine was carved into the back.

He nodded obediently. After a long conversation where the Senior Brother repeatedly urged him to be careful, the older disciple finally departed.

Xiao Yifeng turned the token over in his hand.

In the Wentian Sect, the rule was absolute: hit Level 7, serve in the Enforcement Team.

Unless, of course, you were Su Miaoqing.

With her status as the daughter of a Mahayana expert, she was exempt. No one dared to whisper a complaint about it. The face of a supreme expert like Su Qianyi was worth more than a thousand rules. In this world, the law of the jungle—the law of the strong—was the only constitution that mattered.

Lin Ziyun didn’t want Xiao Yifeng to go because she genuinely cared for him. She saw him as family.

But Xiao Yifeng was merely a True Disciple. Emotionally and logically, he had no excuse to dodge the draft.

Lin Ziyun was from the Luoshu Mansion, an external power. Su Qianyi, meanwhile, was too proud to beg the Enforcement Hall for a favor on behalf of a disciple. This left Xiao Yifeng in an awkward limbo—stuck between protection and protocol.

In truth, the Enforcement Team was just an initial training period. The duties were mundane: patrolling the mountain ranges, hunting low-level Demon Beasts, checking for smugglers, or maintaining order in the sect’s marketplaces.

The stated goal was to cultivate a disciple’s combat ability and instill a sense of mission toward the sect.

The reality was far uglier.

Because every disciple had to participate—including the servant disciples—the team was a melting pot of resentment.

Inequality was the norm. High-cultivation ordinary disciples and seasoned servants often used this opportunity to “haze” the pampered True Disciples who had just reached the seventh layer.

Since everyone belonged to different halls, retaliation was difficult. If you got beaten up in the woods, who would you tell? True Disciples were arrogant creatures; they would rather die than run home to complain that a servant beat them.

Conversely, some servant disciples saw the camp as a ladder. They would debase themselves, resorting to sickening flattery to cling to a True Disciple’s thigh, hoping for a ticket to a better life.

Bullying, sycophancy, corruption. The training camp was a bizarre “Little Jianghu”—a microcosm of the cruel world outside.

Su Qianyi and his wife refused to let Su Miaoqing set foot in such a place. They knew exactly what kind of filth accumulated there.