Yin Hu stared at the two men standing before him in the courtyard.Neither moved, spoke, shifted, fidgeted, or even seemed to be breathing, which was less remarkable for Da Ruis than it was for Zhong Da.The recruitment ledgers sat on the table between them. Seven days of entries. Seven days of setting up in the slums, processing candidates through the orbs, running Da Ruis's older methods, and filtering the results through the threshold criteria that both men had spent an entire evening debating, refining, arguing over, nearly coming to blows about, and then presenting to him with the unified confidence of two people who had found common ground in the simple act of making his life harder.The threshold had been reasonable. He'd agreed to it too. Minimum elemental purity of C-rank or above. Body cultivation ceiling in the top fifteen percent. Cultivation potential that suggested at least Liquid Core was achievable within a natural lifespan without miraculous intervention. Willingness to relocate. No active warrants from the Merchant Emperor's enforcers. No Demonic Cultivation taint above trace levels since Yin Hu could remove it all through purification processes.It was all reasonable… No. It was sensible to keep and apply...More importantly it was achievable given the sheer volume of refugees packed into the slums and the surrounding camps. Hundreds of thousands of displaced souls, many of whom had been cultivators or children of cultivators before IronArch City fell. The numbers alone should have produced dozens of viable candidates.And yet here Yin Hu stood with a final tally that sat at the bottom of the last page in Da Ruis's impeccable handwriting.Zero.Not one or a handful that needed further evaluation. Not even a borderline case they could argue about over tea.Zero.Ta Rae's branches had gone still above him. The Demonic (...)