Daily life of a cultivation judge-Chapter 1073: Deranged and broken (1)

"It's as Brother Duan Ting has said," Liu Ying added, her voice resolute. "Whatever answer or lack of one awaits us at the end of this, we are still grateful. Even you simply hearing us out is more than enough."

Her words were heartfelt, and wasn't just her paying lip service to Yang Qing for his assistance. Yang Qing's willingness to listen had already eased the unbearable burden she'd been carrying. While the weight and guilt remained, they no longer felt as soul-crushing as before.

Yang Qing hearing them out was like someone offering coal during a blizzard, but him extending a hand to help was akin to building them a house lined with fire stones and heat control arrays in the heart of that storm—all at no cost.

If Yang Qing didn't find anything, Liu Ying admitted she would feel disappointed. Yet, even then, she knew she'd remain grateful.

Both she and Duan Ting understood the world they lived in and its harshness. Whether they were willing to admit it aloud or even to themselves, some part of them had already begun to accept the grim possibility that Bai Chen and Jiang Hao were gone.

No matter how much she wanted to ignore that part, it was impossible. The world wasn't kind—it never had been. It kept reminding her, in its cold and unrelenting way, that her boss and the senior she respected could very well be dead. And if they were, no matter how powerful the Order was, it couldn't undo such an ending.

As things stood, she didn't know which cruel outcome she feared more: confirming Bai Chen and Jiang Hao's deaths or being left in the endless torment of not knowing, trapped in a limbo between hope and despair.

Would finding their bodies—or even just confirmation of their deaths—make it easier to bear compared to the uncertainty?

It was a question she couldn't answer. But what she did know, right now, was that she was grateful to Yang Qing and would continue to be, no matter how this unfolded. And she was certain Duan Ting felt the same.

After all, no one truly understood the pain of a snake's bite except those who had been bitten. Duan Ting was the only person who could comprehend what she felt and the burdens she had carried these past few weeks, just as she understood the weight he bore.

About the only good thing from this whole situation, other than Yang Qing helping them, of course, was she didn't have to bear that weight alone. She shuddered at the thought of what it would have been like for her if she was the only one left, with Duan Ting missing with the rest.

"My mind would have been gone. It wouldn't have been far-fetched for me to experience qi deviation," she thought, a wry smile tugging at her lips. "Maybe that's why I haven't made a single improvement in the past fifteen years..." she mused.

Bai Chen had once touted her as having the best natural talent out of the three escort supervisors, even surpassing his own disciple, Jiang Hao, who was at the quasi-palace stage.

The source of this c𝐨ntent is freёnovelkiss.com.

That praise had filled her with immense pride, especially considering that, from childhood, all she had ever received from her parents was scorn.

She hailed from a slightly well-off clan. In the grander scheme of things, it wasn't much—a rank-four clan with modest standing—but within the ranks of similar organizations, they were better off than most. The Shi Clan, as it was known, had close to thirty core formation stage experts and a history stretching back 10,000 years. They had a decent territory and had even allied themselves with a prominent rank-three sect to secure their position comfortably.

Her father had been one of the high-ranking elders within the clan. As for her mother, she had originally been one of his servants, whom he later took as a concubine when she became pregnant.

While her father couldn't be described as overly lecherous, he was obsessed with siring many children, hoping to realize his ambitions through them. This obsession grew as he aged. His children were not raised to inherit his legacy out of pride or familial duty; instead, they were his lottery tickets, his gamble for future glory.

Her father's own talent for cultivation was mediocre at best. In contrast, his skills in alchemy were semi-decent, which he heavily relied on to reach the upper echelons of the Shi Clan.

Using his status as an alchemist, he managed to climb to the late stages of the core formation realm and with it, a rise in the clan's hierarchy, securing the position of a high-ranking elder.

However, this rise wasn't due to true talent or accumulated insight. It was built on alchemical pills and treasures that he had siphoned from the clan for personal use.

Despite all these efforts, the farthest he ever managed to reach was the seventh stage of core formation. That cultivation base, while respectable, was the limit of what his abilities and resources could achieve. He had hit an insurmountable ceiling, and no amount of pills or treasures could push him beyond it. His talent had long since been exhausted, leaving him in a state of perpetual stagnation and frustration.

It was in the midst of that despair that he concocted another idea.

There was a saying in the world: When Immortals rise, even their chickens and dogs ascend with them. This was the principle Liu Ying's father sought to emulate through his children. His ambition drove him to sire as many offspring as possible, hoping that one of them would be talented enough to help him break through the barriers of the core formation realm.

The idea wasn't entirely unfounded. After all, many prominent organizations had risen to power in similar ways—by nurturing a few exceptional talents who laid a solid foundation for others to follow.

Her father's dream hinged on the notion that if even one of his children reached the late stages of the palace realm, their insight and strength would surely be enough to guide him past his own bottleneck. He was only a few minor stages away from the palace realm, after all. And if multiple children—four or five, perhaps—managed to achieve such heights, the odds of his success would increase exponentially.

However, his obsession blinded him to the reality of how difficult it was to produce even a single palace realm expert, let alone four or five. If it were truly so simple, their clan, which had stood for over 10,000 years, boasting dozens of core formation experts and an alliance with a sect that had at least eight palace realm cultivators, would have surely produced one by now. Yet they had not.

To Liu Ying, it was clear that her father had grown senile in his fixation. His desperation to achieve the palace realm drove him to impose absurdly high expectations on his children, demanding nothing short of excellence from each of them.

For his children to stand a chance of reaching the palace realm, Liu Ying's father set impossibly high benchmarks. They had to reach the qi refinement realm by the age of seven, break through to the foundation establishment realm by twenty—with top-tier orange-grade pillars that bore shades of blue, at the very least—and then ascend to the core formation realm no later than thirty-five. Ideally, they would cultivate with blue-grade pillars, but he begrudgingly accepted orange-grade ones as a fallback.

All of this had to be accomplished using an orange-grade cultivation art. While the spirit vein of their clan was decent, being of high grade, the rest of the resources were far from adequate to support the lofty goals he had set. The alchemical pills and potions available were of average quality and grade, and even their quantity was insufficient. The cultivation techniques at their disposal were limited, with the best among them barely reaching the middle-tier of orange-grade arts.

Given these constraints, it was almost laughable that he expected to produce palace realm experts. When questioned about the impracticality of his demands, his rebuttal was always the same: "The worth of a diamond isn't affected by a stain of mud on its surface. True talent is being able to use average resources to achieve monumental results." He frequently cited the creator of the Mortal Path's To Transcendence cultivation art as an example—a cultivator with no backing or resources who had ascended to unimaginable heights, reaching the soul formation realm, a level that most cultivators could only dream of.