Daily life of a cultivation judge

Yu Gen nodded to the panel as he handed out grey talismans, along with recording talismans to the panel.

"Following Yang Qing's deductions, and with the help of the Wind Gliding Mercenaries we were able to narrow down the list of suspects to Ice Emerald Sect.

While there are many organizations that have yin-based techniques and powerful ones at that, there were few that had relations with the areas that Ma Yuan and his life had lived at over the years.

When Ice Emerald Sect came out as a suspect, we had to dig further since on paper, they don't seem like the type.

Their reputation is of an ascetic sect that keeps to themselves. Other than the hostile relationship they had with the Lunar Bug Sect they were cordial with most of the other organizations within their area and their neighbors.

Even from 9,000 years ago, when they first produced a palace realm cultivator, the way they operated never changed. 

They kept to themselves, had minimal activity outside their own sect grounds, and even their territories are usually handled by subordinate organizations. 

When they became a rank 3 sect, they didn't overly display their power or grab territories of those around them. Though their territory has grown over the years, it wasn't of their own doing. Some of the organizations around them willingly ceded some of their territories in exchange for being under their banner.

The terms of subordination are fair when compared to other organizations. The Ice Emerald Sect only requires 30% of the resources within the territories of the organizations subordinated to it, and are amiable in the duration of the payment.

By all accounts, on the surface, they seemed like an above-board sect, which was why Xia Ting and I had some doubts that one of their members was really involved in the kidnapping. With the reputation that they have built up, there is no need for that, and cases of organizations flawlessly framing each other are not unheard of..."

All members present nodded at that conjecture. Since the Order began its work, that has been one of the impediments to their work. 

When the Order started, a lot of organizations around the continent would try to frame each other so as to try to borrow the Order's hands to get rid of their enemies. 

At the start, almost 30 of 100 cases were deliberate frame jobs. Every organization out there saw the Order as the knife they could wield against their enemies. The frame jobs were subpar at the start and did not require a lot of effort on the Order's part to unravel for them.

To deter such cases from happening, the punishment was severe for those caught. A crippling or five was usually handed down, along with a 50-year ban and forced isolation in which the organization caught in the act was forbidden from stepping outside their main grounds within the duration of that ban.

The sentence could be longer depending on the severity of their frame job.

However, despite the risks and punishments associated with the framing of others, their numbers didn't dwindle and only grew in sophistication. It was for this reason that the Order altered its lineup.

At the start, every judge was assigned one inquisitor to handle all their workload, but with the increasing complexity of the frame jobs and the lengths to which different organizations would go to, to one up each other, the number of inquisitors attached to a judge increased.

Currently, every judge needed a minimum of five inquisitors, and the upper limit was ten. It was to give the inquisitors breathing room and reduce their caseloads. They needed to have sufficient time to vet the cases handed off to them, and before the cases reached their hands, some would have already had preliminary investigations done on them by investigators from the administration hall.

"Xia Ting investigated with that in mind. At the time we thought there might have been a possibility of the Ice Emerald Sect being framed. Despite keeping to themselves, they have no shortage of enemies.

We therefore started digging into cases with an almost similar setting. A series of kidnappings more specifically one of young girls, and one done by women. 

With the sect's reputation of being an only female sect, if they were to be framed and make it seem believable, it would have to be tied to how the sect is.

We began the investigation within the Ice Emerald Sect's territory as we worked our way outwards toward their neighbors both the ones they had a good relationship with and ones they had a hostile relationship with.

Within their territory there were minimal cases of kidnappings and the ones that were recorded were usually of the normal variety associated with gangs, debts, and the like.

But as we made our way outside the territory of the sect, a few cases here and there started popping out. Girls barely ten years old, taken away, their families missing.

Those cases by themself had nothing in common, other than the fact that they involved young girls. But the more we dug, we found out that the case had a sudden spike in the past 20 years. Before that, such cases were rare.

We decided to deepen our investigations by researching the areas a century or two back and see if those kidnappings were there..."

With the long lives of cultivators, and esoteric arts that could retrace the life or history of an area even a few millennia back, digging up information that happened a few centuries back was not a hard thing.

It would only be hard if the area under investigation had all residents and witnesses massacred, and every karma associated with the place erased.

But as long as that was not done, finding out about the history of a place that dates back 1,000 years ago was as easy as researching what happened a day ago in the area.

"About two hundred years ago, there was a spike in the kidnapping cases in the territories of the neighbors surrounding the Ice Emerald Sect.

If one wasn't looking they could easily overlook it, since the cases were spread about through the 200 years so as not to stand out.

Realizing that in itself was a pattern, we extended our research timeline to 1,000 years. When we did that, a veil unfolded and something was revealed.

The girls that went missing, based on the description of the witnesses, all possessed a quality, and based on the description, that quality has likely association with special physiques that may be Yin related.

While all these are not enough to point a finger at the Ice Emerald Sect, it was enough for us to doubt them and treat them as suspects. 

We intensified our investigations and formed a new thread with the Ice Emerald Sect as being guilty of all those kidnappings over the past millennia, and we kept pulling it.

We finally managed to find a living witness per se, as we furthered our investigation about 5,000 years back.."

"A living witness? If they have been that long, it means they are a palace realm cultivator by now. With their strength, how come they are coming forward only now?" asked Mo Liwei.