The Age of Martial Enlightenment.
In the beginning, mankind was weak. Prey to beasts, to plague, to the winds and whims of the heavens. Kingdoms rose and fell like sandcastles at the edge of a storm-tossed sea. Swords rusted. Kings bled. No one was beyond death.
But then came the Nine Pillars.
Forged in the twilight of the ancient world by nameless sages who pierced the secrets of heaven and earth, the Pillars were not structures of stone, but of spirit, flesh, and will. They were paths—painful, ruthless, divine paths—by which a mortal might climb beyond the chains of his body and seize dominion over it.
The First Pillar, Strength Refinement, marked the beginning of the path. For ten years, a cultivator would temper their raw might until their muscles became as iron and their blows could break boulders. From there, the path only grew steeper.
Flesh Refinement hardened skin into armor.
Muscle Refinement made each sinew a coiled spring of destruction.
Tendon Refinement—the Fourth Pillar—turned movement into mastery, footstep into flight, swordplay into something near divine.
And beyond that?
Bone, Organ, Marrow, Blood, and finally, Meridian Refinement—the ninth and last Pillar—was said to bestow eternal life, peerless power, and the ability to shatter mountains with a breath. At its peak stood the Martial Emperors, titans in human form. Yet such beings were as rare as phoenixes.
Each Pillar demanded a toll of decades—forty years for the Fourth, ninety for the Ninth—but time given was returned a hundredfold. A cultivator aged slower, lived longer, endured more. But few ever had the resolve—or the years—to climb far.
This was the Age of Martial Enlightenment, where kingdoms no longer measured greatness by armies or coin, but by the strength of their cultivators. Martial sects rivaled noble houses. Swordsmen wandered the land like demigods. The strong dictated truth, and the weak obeyed.
