pjbooks Chapter 113 couldn't sit still anymore.
Chapter 113 couldn't sit still anymore.
When the news reached Jiang Chen's home, he was watering the rose bush that had sprouted new buds on the balcony. The setting sun cast a pale golden glow on the plastic watering can in his hand, and the water poured from the spout, making a soft rustling sound as it landed on the soil. The new bud had grown taller than yesterday, its stem straight, and its tender green leaves, covered with a thin layer of down, swayed gently in the evening breeze.
"Brother Chen, do you know how many people have signed up globally right now?" Wang Kai's voice came through the phone, brimming with barely suppressed excitement. "Eighteen million! Eighteen million! In my seventeen years of life, I've never seen so many people competing for a single spot anywhere!"
"Hmm." Jiang Chen poured another ladle of water, his tone as calm as if he were just saying that the weather was nice today.
"Brother Chen, get excited! You're the first dean! The dean of the first cultivation academy in human history! You—"
"Will getting excited make that rose bloom faster?" Jiang Chen interrupted him, placing the watering can on the balcony and leaning against the railing, looking down at the old lady still walking her teddy bear by the flower bed. "See you at the factory at six tomorrow morning. If you're lucky enough to break through to the second level of Qi Refining today, congratulations in advance."
As he hung up the phone, Wang Kai was still shouting on the other end, "Brother Chen, how did you know I was about to break through? You didn't even come to the factory—" Jiang Chen didn't reply, put his phone back in his pocket, and turned to walk into the living room.
Jiang Xueqin was sitting on the sofa, holding her phone, the screen displaying Weibo's trending topics. Of the top fifty topics, forty-eight were related to Qingyun Academy. The number one one was #QingyunAcademy'sFirstDeanJiangChen#, followed by a gold-plated "Explosive" label, with views already exceeding 20 billion.
"Director Su called this afternoon." Jiang Xueqin put her phone on the coffee table, looked up at Jiang Chen, and said, "He said that the Dragon Kingdom Academy of Sciences produced the design blueprints for Qingyun Academy overnight. The academy is divided into three areas—the outer academy is for physical cultivation, the middle academy is for immortal cultivation, and the inner academy is your private area. It covers an area of about 3,000 acres, which is about one-third the size of the old city of Jiangzhou."
"Three thousand mu," Jiang Chen repeated the number, sitting down next to her. "That's enough."
Jiang Xueqin looked at him, at the boy sitting beside her, wearing a white T-shirt, his hair still a little messy. Three thousand acres of land, a global enrollment scope, and over ten million applicants in a single day—her greatest dream in her forty-plus years was to send her son to university, find a stable job, get him married, and live a peaceful life. Now, the world's attention was focused on her son. People called him the Immortal Emperor; he named the first cultivation academy after his master. And her only worry was whether her son had eaten on time.
Outside the window, night deepened. Jiang Chen leaned back on the sofa, staring at the old crack on the ceiling that stretched from the corner to near the light fixture. It was there that summer when he was seven, ten years ago now. Ten years. A thousand years. Everything in this house was still the same—the faded "Fu" character was still on the door, the indelible soy sauce stain on the old carpet remained, and the pencil marks on the wall still climbed from knee-high to the top of the doorframe. But the world outside the window was different. Tomorrow, he would stand in the empty space of the abandoned factory, facing the first batch of trainees selected from around the world, and tell them how to walk this path.
Meanwhile, far away in the Void Temple of the Apostles, the twelve dark golden thrones were still arranged in a ring, but the two that once belonged to Astra and Morghana had completely collapsed, even the fragments of their bases being swallowed up by the void. The light of the seventh throne was slightly dimmer than before, as if the remnants of Balthazaron's soul on the edge of the abyss were still putting on a death throes.
A light screen condensed from pure laws hung in the center of the ring, repeatedly playing not battle scenes—but the signature on the last page of the recruitment brochure. The small print at the end of the brochure was magnified to the extreme—"The path of cultivation does not ask about background, only about one's Dao heart." The signature contained only two words: Jiang Chen.
"Three thousand acres," the Fourth Apostle Mephistopheles spoke. Her short, silver-gray hair had returned to its original color, but a strand of pure black still lingered at the ends. She glanced at the struggling dark green soul fire on the Seventh Throne before quickly turning her deep purple pupils back to the light screen.
"It doesn't cost much for humans to build an academy using minerals and concrete. But the sentence he printed at the end of the brochure—'Don't ask about background, only look at the heart of the Dao'—makes me more uncomfortable than those two sword strikes he made outside Liangzhou City."
"Why?" The Third Apostle, Neltharion, turned his head. This Void Watcher kept his dark blue eyelids half-closed, with only the dark blue mist emanating from the thin crack at the corner of his mouth revealing that he was listening attentively.
"Because those two swords killed more than forty demon kings and one demon god; that was destruction. Destruction will terrify the enemy, but it won't make the terrified enemy stronger. And that sentence was an invitation—no, a summons. He was summoning all the ordinary people who thought they weren't worthy of our attention, telling them, 'You can come.' If the cultivation civilization truly spreads throughout the human world, then we will no longer be facing just one Jiang Chen, but an entire group of cultivators. We still have an understanding of the upper limit of individual strength, but the upper limit of the spread of civilization is something we can't even touch."
The runes in the light membrane around the Seventh Apostle Sorger's eyes swirled rapidly, an instinctive reaction during high-speed calculations. "Current intelligence indicates that he personally trained two people in the abandoned factory. One is named Wang Kai, who reached the first level of Qi Refining in seven days and showed signs of second-level Qi Refining spiritual energy fluctuations on the eighth day. The other is named Shen Qingxue, who has no spiritual root but has completed the first stage of body cultivation, 'Ice Tempering Bones,' and her punching power, converted according to the human Awakened system, is now close to S-level body cultivator. These two are still students, but if the Qingyun Academy's training system replicates this speed—even if only half—within ten years, humanity will have thousands of Qi Refining cultivators. That will be the largest reshuffling of the power structure in the history of this planet."
"There's something even more troublesome," Thran, who had been silent all along, suddenly spoke. The Mirror of Nothingness still kept its eyes closed, its long, silvery-white hair falling silently over the shoulders of its pure white robe, but its eyelashes trembled more frequently than usual—a subtle movement that only occurred when it reflected something it didn't want to see.
"I have seen his next plan. His True Essence Array can create artificial spiritual energy. Although the concentration cannot be compared with the spiritual veins of the cultivation world, it is more than enough to cover the area of Qingyun Academy, which spans three thousand acres. A large number of awakened individuals have already begun to apply for transfer to Jiangzhou."
Kahn finally spoke: "I've said it before, he's an accident. A unique case from a higher-dimensional cultivation civilization. Accidents can be observed and measured in a laboratory, but if an accident begins to build its own laboratory, it's no longer an accident, but a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift doesn't require defeating all enemies; it only requires proving that another path can be taken."
In the void, light flowed slowly. After a while, Kahn asked again, "Is there any movement from the Demon Realm?"
"Nesario is silent," Thran replied with his eyes closed. "But the energy field at the bottom of the Abyss has shown three large-scale anomalies since last night—the first after the live broadcast of the Liangzhou victory, the second after the release of the Qingyun Academy's admission brochure, and the third just now. They should be having a meeting in the temple of the Seven Pillars of the Abyss right now."
Kahn closed his eyes slightly: "For the first time in three hundred years, the Demon Realm is getting restless not because of us, but because of a seventeen-year-old human high school student—no, a school that hasn't even been built yet. Let them worry, we'll watch."