NOVEL NEXT Chapter 57: Incident
In this week alone, there was an addition of five foundation building realm cultivators on the Battle hall bringing the total to thirty without counting Radha. Out of thirty, only four were in the middle stages and the remaining were in the initial stages. Although the upper battle prowess was not satisfactory, the Battle hall members were all elite. Even the lowest cultivation was qi sensing the seventh realm and there were only four of them in this stage. But those were all youngsters with great potential. When Punya chose two hundred clan members to send to the Bareback mountains, he chose the most promising candidates of the clan so that they could survive what was to come.
Among those candidates Radha chose the best of them so even if they had low cultivation realm initially, with the boost of top-quality pills, Radha’s training, and battle in the wilderness, it was like injecting steroids and going to the gym daily for five hours. The members of Battle hall didn’t have to care for pill poisoning and unstable foundation as Radha created a training regimen for each member. With her teaching, their sword skills and cultivation realms increased with rocket speed. Mind you when they started the lowest was at the third stage of qi sensing realm. If anyone from the city finds out, they will be shocked out of their wits. Even the geniuses of the royal family and sects didn’t improve that fast.
Not only was their cultivation realm high they were incredibly strong, except for those monster geniuses who could be battle cultivators upon reaching the foundation building realm, the members of Battle hall were invincible on the same stage. This was because Radha’s training was hellish and there were recovery pills and stamina boosting pills readily available for them. Kumari was refining the pills non-stop for weeks and most of these pills went to the Battle hall members. Even if they didn’t want to, the members were forced to grow stronger because they had no choice, forget about them anyone in the clan didn’t have the guts to go against Radha. If they complained to anyone, they would only be miserable so they had no choice but to endure and this endurance was what made them stronger.
In the previous skirmishes with small clans, three members of the Rijal clan were suspected to have died but there was no proof, and cultivators missing on the Bareback mountains usually don’t return. But it was clear that the other two clans were not behind it because with the delicate situation present, they would not be foolish enough to give excuses that could lead to a full-blown war and they also had few of their members killed. The great clans would not encroach upon other great clans’ territory knowingly as this would be seen as a provocation. Even a little excuse was enough to create the spark for war. If it was any other time, a simple apology and little compensation would suffice but now none of them could afford an apology or compensation.
Reading the reports about the improvement of Battle hall members Punya smiled because he knew with the rate of their development, they could single-handedly defeat the whole of the Lunaris city in a year or two. There were some sacrifices along the way, and the strength of the surviving members was increasing. Although there were a lot of initial stage foundation building cultivators and few in middle stage and high stage, this was the situation all over the Lunaris city. This was the limitation for the members of the third-tier city.
Although the resources were enough to break through the foundation building realm, progressing from there required a lot of talent, resources, and luck which very few in the third tier city had. This was the situation all over the kingdom. And even in other kingdoms, the situation was similar. First, they were limited by their cultivation techniques, the spirit vein, and resources. Any place with great resources was occupied by strong clans. No one wanted to see weak clans occupying good resource spots and no weak clans dared to do so in this cultivation world. The law only applied to weak people.
For example, if a Nascent soul cultivator came to the Emerald kingdom and slaughtered the whole city, he would face no repercussions and instead would be invited to be a guest elder by the royal family or the sects. But if a mortal even dares to look into the eyes of a cultivator for a few breaths, receiving a beating till half dead state would be a good outcome. After reading the report about Battle hall, he picked up another scroll.
After reading for a few minutes, he furrowed his brows and his expression changed suddenly. The smile that was hanging over his face previously had turned into an angry face, rage seething within. The report contained happenings of the past week. In the report, there were some mysterious and unexplained deaths and disappearances of the clan members. Although there were many members in the Rijal clan, there were a little more than 1500 members who had the Rijal clan’s bloodline. Of the remaining some had married into the clan, some were servants for generations, and some of the talented ones were adopted and given the Rijal surname later.
Even in the other clans, the number didn’t exceed five thousand because most of them were newly found and even for old clans, more members don’t mean more power necessarily, sometimes the resources, the clan needed to spend on them will only place them at a disadvantage. But for the Rijal clan to have their members killed was a naked provocation. The Rijals were a little petty when their clan members were at a disadvantage. They could hold a grudge. And this was enough for the Rijal clan to hold a grudge for a lifetime.
The members who were killed were running missions for the clan. Some were in charge of buying resources for the clan disguised as merchants from other third-tier cities, some were hunting a specific monster or searching for a specific herb. This was not just an outsider job, although the identities of those members were not secretive, only a few members of the clan were privy to that knowledge. Punya was not furious just because the clan members died but someone from the clan had leaked their identities and locations. He knew there was a mole or two among higher-ups but he thought they would only leak some information. Helping outsiders kill their own clan members, this was crossing a line.