Chapter 4870 — The Alliance Leader
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
If he could not use his divine sense, he would have to rely on his naked eyes alone. Yet perhaps because of the enmity between Morning Star and Morning Pride, the territories allotted to the two sides were placed far apart. Unless Wei Zhao climbed onto the platform and picked a good angle, trying to find someone through the gaps between so many academies' disciples was a fool's dream.
A short while later, all the academies' disciples had taken their places, and the senior figures of every academy had likewise seated themselves. Then a young man suddenly appeared at the very center of the platform, and everyone's expression turned grave; no one dared speak.
Everyone was sizing up this young man, Wei Zhao naturally included. Though the man looked young and radiated no fearsome aura whatsoever, everyone knew there could be only one person who would appear on that platform at such a moment: the legendary Alliance Leader.
Wei Zhao exchanged a glance with Wang Xinyan and Huang Xiaotao beside him, a measure of astonishment on all their faces. They had assumed the Alliance Leader would be an elder of Ling Yuanqing's ethereal, otherworldly bearing—never had they expected such a young and handsome face.
Still, this was hardly outlandish. Once cultivators advanced to the Heaven Rank, their looks would be forever fixed; so long as they wished it, they could live hundreds or even thousands of years retaining the appearance they had at the moment of their ascension. It came down purely to personal preference.
It was merely that women prized beauty and men prized gravitas—an exceedingly common state of affairs in the cultivation world. Most male cultivators, even after reaching the Heaven Rank, would not deliberately halt the aging of their features, preferring to keep the appearance of a dignified middle or old age. After all, for a centuries-old monster to insist on preserving a twenty-year-old's youthful face left one at a loss for words...
But this Alliance Leader was plainly an exception—he belonged to that small minority.
Almost every disciple below was exchanging looks, yet not one dared make the slightest sound. The man on the platform was a legendary giant of the Earth-Splitting stage, perhaps even the Sea-Rending stage; even if he leaked not a trace of aura, the name alone was enough to press the breath out of everyone present.
The Alliance Leader slowly swept his gaze across the whole assembly, until some of the academy disciples were on the verge of crumbling under it, and only then did he finally speak slowly: "You are all elites from the various academies, and you have come here for one purpose alone—to break through to Mystic Ascension. Although private combat is not forbidden in this trial, I hope you will keep first things first! And one more thing: you had best not harbor the laughable notion that a failure this time can be made up next time, for by past experience, once the first attempt at Mystic Ascension fails, the second will be ten times harder, and the third a hundred times. Weigh it well!"
A stifling silence fell over the crowd at these words. In truth, among the many academy disciples present there were indeed some who had come to the Giants' Road a second or even a third time—Morning Star Academy had one such this time, a taciturn middle-aged man.
By rights, a man with that first experience behind him would have stood a very good chance had he stepped forward two days ago to contest the captaincy. Yet from first to last he had not uttered a single word, barely registering as a presence at all; the drive and ambition the others carried had long since drained out of him, and ordinarily no one paid him the slightest attention.