Nine days. That was how long Lin Feng had before the Sect Envoy arrived.
He sat on the Outer Courtyards steps after Qingyun Gu shuffled away and looked out across the compound for a long moment. The last of the afternoon light was slipping behind the western ridgeline, painting the packed earth of the training grounds in long, copper-coloured shadows.
A few outer disciples were still at work on their technique forms near the far wall, their movements growing sloppy with fatigue.
He watched them for a while. Then he stood and went inside. There was work to do.
---
The next morning, before the breakfast bell, Lin Feng was already at the eastern edge of the training grounds.
Instructor Daowl kei had given the intermediate group a standard morning routine: five hundred stance repetitions, followed by Qi circulation drills and two hours of technique practice. It was solid foundational work, the kind that built a stable base over years of repetition.
For Lin Feng, it served a different purpose. Every structured drill gave him a framework to compare against what the War God Art was already doing to his body. He could feel the difference between Daowei's approved Qi circulation method and the deep-running battle-current that the War God Art maintained at all times.
The clan's method moved Qi in slow, deliberate cycles. The War God Art ran Qi the way a river runs downhill, constantly, with weight and intent behind every pulse.
He ran both at the same time during morning drills and no one noticed.
To outside eyes, he simply looked like a disciplined disciple working through the standard routine with more focus than most.
After drills, while the other intermediate disciples took their rest break, Lin Feng excused himself to the second-tier technique library.
The library was a single long room on the second floor of the eastern building, its shelves lined with jade slip cases and bound cultivation records. A thin, bored-looking elder named Elder Fan sat at the entrance desk, responsible for logging who borrowed what.
He looked up when Lin Feng entered, and down again just as quickly. It was the look of someone who had decided that anything requiring interacting with disciples was not worth enthusiasm.
Lin Feng signed the entry log and moved to the back shelves.
He was not there for cultivation techniques. He had already decided that the War God Art was his primary method and that borrowing competing sect techniques would only create interference. What he wanted were reference texts.
He found what he was looking for on the third shelf from the right: a slim volume titled Notes on the Clear River County Assessment, compiled by a previous senior disciple who had participated in one of the earlier rounds.
Next to it sat a thicker book, Observations on Houtian Realm Breakthroughs in the Azure Hills Region, written by a former Verdant Sword Sect outer elder.
He took both to a reading table and began. The assessment notes were more useful than he had expected.
The multi-stage tournament format was not a simple elimination bracket. According to the notes, the Verdant Sword Sect's Sect Envoy typically structured the selection around three stages.
The first stage was a cultivation level check. Participants whose cultivation had not reached at least the seventh sublayer of Body Tempering; Meridian Opening, were immediately cut.
This eliminated most of the county's weaker rogue cultivators and ensured only the genuinely developed talents moved forward.
The second stage was a group test, a scenario-based assessment rather than pure combat. Past examples included navigating a beast-infested terrain, solving a formation puzzle under time pressure, and surviving a staged ambush.
The point was not just to see how strong a candidate was, but how they thought and how they behaved under real pressure.
The third stage was the tournament proper. The surviving candidates were sorted by lot into a bracket, and they fought until ten remained.
Lin Feng read the notes twice and then sat quietly for a moment.
His cultivation level would pass the first cut easily. He was at Meridian Opening, the seventh sublayer, and pushing toward Acupoint Awakening. That put him ahead of most candidates his age.
The second stage was the interesting one. A scenario test rewarded exactly what he had been building for years: calm judgment, pattern recognition, and the ability to act efficiently under pressure. Those were not skills that showed up in a cultivation level check. They had to be demonstrated.
He was not worried about the third stage. He had spent months learning how to win fights without showing everything he had. A tournament was simply a cleaner version of what he had been doing.
He returned the books, signed the exit log, and left the library.