The tournament grounds smelled of stone dust, spiritual incense, and the compressed anticipation of several hundred cultivators who had been waiting in one place long enough to start getting competitive about it.
The arena carved itself into the earth like a wound that had healed wrong — three hundred feet of ancient stone wall forming a perfect circle, the interior wide enough to hold a small city, the floor divided into marked competition zones by lines of embedded qi-stones that glowed pale amber in the morning light. Five great gates faced each cardinal direction and one facing straight up — the portal gate, its frame sixty feet tall, carved in the Giant Lineage's ancestral script, pulsing with a deep, slow blue that was visible from two miles in the sky.
Disciples from fourteen different sects filled the interior.
