Flying down towards the surface entrance, Sage saw a massive line waiting to enter the tower while there was also a steady flow heading out. The line was filled with a motley crew of all sorts of different beings and creatures. House-sized wagons being pulled by Demonic Beasts were quite common and the appearance of those beasts varied greatly. There was one wagon that was covered in sharply twisted and pointed scrap metal being pulled by a team of immense one-eyed green-skinned oxen. Then just slightly back in the line there was a brilliant white carriage that was just as detailed and intricate as the finest lace, yet it was carved out of bones. This carriage was being drawn by a gigantic white lion with a metallic gold mane. A bit further back there was a palanquin the size of a small living room, being held up by a hundred burly men wearing matching uniforms. This small room had railing and a half-dozen people walking about, drinking wine and enjoying the view, ignoring the fact that so many people were holding them in the air.

Sage also saw a few people that he’d only seen at the Depths in the past, but with a closer look it was only a small portion of those different types of people. What he saw corresponded with his guess. The Cultivators that used ‘Qi’ all seemed to be present while those more foreign types that used ‘mana’ or other even more unusual things didn’t seem to be. Of course, this was only his guesses as he was purely judging these people based upon the styles of their clothing and weapons.

Seeing the length of the line, Sage could only sigh and fly down to the back of it. As he moved, many in the line looked up in envy at his Flying Magic Tool. From the looks of things and also from the strength of those on the ground he could tell the more powerful people were all going in at upper tier entrances. Unfortunately, since it was his ‘first’ time here, he had to wait in this long line with all the weaker people. While he thought about trying to be pushy and see if he could cut because of his strength, he didn’t want to cause any trouble and end up getting banned, or worse. Guan Zhenyan wasn’t very helpful in this regard as he had been given the proper identification from a friend.

Reluctantly, Sage flew down to the end of the line and hopped off of the Red Comet, putting it away and standing in the line like the thousands of others who were waiting. On the plus side, the line moved pretty quickly so it seemed he would only have to spend one day in the line. Those near him seemed eager to speak with him when they saw his Flying Tool, but then when they realized they couldn’t sense his strength they kept their mouth shut. None of them conjured up enough guts to bother him, probably because he was mostly closing his eyes with his arms crossed, very much looking like he wasn’t friendly.

Many hours later, he finally reached the huge gates on the side of the mountainous tower. Up close these gates were about a hundred feet wide and tall, but these two huge openings seemed tiny in comparison to the immensity of the whole building. The line pushed into the giant gate and he looked up to see that the walls of this building were more than thirty feet thick. After passing through the entranceway he entered a walled off square. The line advanced a bit further and then split into two. The main line went forward where people were showing their identification and then having their cargo checked. A smaller line split off to the side and this was where Sage went as the attendants made sure everyone knew this was for new people. A few minutes later he was led into one of a dozen small offices in order to get an identity token.

“Name and rank, please.”

“Lang Sheng, sixth.”

The woman looked up from her paperwork and her eyes widened. Then she nodded and indicated a set of devices in front of her, “Write your name here, and then place some of your Qi into this stone.”

Sage followed the instructions and in just a moment the woman handed him a small rectangular plaque that carried a trace of his aura within it. She bowed deeply, “Welcome to the Capital. Please use this to read the rules, if you’d like a copy to take with you they cost 3 Spirit Stones. Have a nice day.”

She pointed out a Jade Tablet and Sage nodded, using it to read and memorize the rules and basic information of the city. He walked out of the room calmly, which surprised the woman as most people who read the rules were surprised by the things they read. What she didn’t know was that Sage was surprised but he had plenty of time to come to terms with it as the teams on the Inner World already noted down and entered the information into their databases.

The Tianxia Capital’s overwhelming size was only more pronounced when it was quantified. This ‘tower’ was 1008 miles wide, and 10,080 miles tall, though to be fair these weren’t the ‘miles’ he knew from earth, but a similar distance in this world’s language. This immense structure was split into many floors that were each 1008 feet tall. There were 52,800 floors, which they referred to as levels. Terrifyingly, each of these levels was the equivalent of a massive amount of territory and were larger than the Capital City of the Dou Kingdom. The first 50,000 levels were each overseen by a Lord in the sixth rank.

Discovering just this basic information was more than enough to show the great gap between this Imperial Capital and the Dou Kingdom. It was also a sobering reminder to him to be careful of this place and its inhabitants. There were at least 50,000 Nascent Souls in this place and these were only the most ordinary levels of the Tianxia Capital. The upper 2,800 levels were the territory of the Imperials themselves. Two thousand of them for their trusted guards and eight hundred for the Imperial Family alone.

Sage had no idea how many kingdoms the Tianxia Capital had under them, but it almost seemed like the population and sheer size of this Capital itself made him wonder if all the other territory they managed was only equal to this place. The Dou Kingdom had more than a thousand cities, but most of them were much smaller than one of the levels of the Tianxia Capital. The Tianxia Empire couldn’t have fifty kingdoms beneath it, right? So judging simply by the size of cities, was the capital larger than the cities of all its vassal kingdoms combined?

The land area that each Kingdom covered was quite large and he’d estimated the Dou and Shihu Kingdoms spanned a hundred thousand miles across, which meant they covered nearly 10 billion square miles. So, if the statistics were correct, this Tianxia Capital had 53 billion square miles of area through all its levels. It was a simple task to use his prior travels and an Adjutor to determine these statistics, and it showed that this Capital was as large as five kingdoms. It didn’t account for everything though, as this trip had proven, there was a massive amount of untamed wilderness between every kingdom which meant the total area of the Empire’s territory was even more terrifying. Was this the only Empire in this world, or were there more? How large was this planet he was on? Was it even a planet?