Daily life of a cultivation judge

A somber atmosphere spread all around. The king who had been silent almost throughout the banquet finally spoke up.

"Branch Chief Yang Qing, I won't beat around the bush. The reason I invited you over is because of the obsidian serpents and the report that was graciously handed to us about the fire adler bear, the gorge with the profound yin artifact, the parasitic purple flower spore sycamore tree, and the jade nature stone protected by the mountain jade serpent.

While the latter three are not much of an issue for us the former two are of grave concern to our kingdom.." said the King.

His remark was met by welcomed nods all around the table. Every member present except for Yang Qing had grave expressions regarding the news touching on the two subject matters.

The kingdom had already experienced the wrath of the two obsidian serpents. Both wiped out an entire royal guard team that had three palace realm experts and killed two princes armed with all kinds of artifacts that would help safeguard their lives even against palace realm experts despite they themselves being at the late stages of the core formation realm.

There were two seventh-stage palace realm spirit beasts with one of them being a variant that was at the cusp of an evolution to a flood dragon and worse they had a blood feud with the kingdom from a misunderstanding. As if that wasn't enough of a headache for the Deer Mountain Kingdom, they got additional information from the Order about another spirit beast within their territory that was just about to break through to the domain realm.

Both news left the higher-ups of the kingdom on edge. With their current abilities, they had nothing to defend themselves against the two groups. The strongest expert of the kingdom was at the sixth stage of the palace realm. That was insufficient to defend against two seventh-stage obsidian serpents let alone a domain-level spirit beast.

The best they could do was hole up within their territory and operate the Ebony Twilight Sanctuary array at full capacity every second of every day. However, such a measure was unsustainable. For one since the array covered only select parts of the kingdom, they would have to abandon a bulk part of their territory, then came the matter of the cost incurred to sustain the array. 

The rumors surrounding the Deer Mountain Kingdom were partly true. The kingdom was built atop the Ebony Twilight Sanctuary Array. The framework and structure of the array had already been inlaid all over the region of the present-day Deer Mountain Kingdom before they even settled there. The founder and the then heads of some of the oldest aristocratic families of the kingdom discovered the array and it covered a much wider scope than what it covered presently.

When they discovered the array, it was dormant and only a third seemed intact, with the rest completely damaged. Since they didn't have the skills to repair or restore it, they decided to reawaken the part that was still functional.

For the next five thousand years they poured countless resources into it including even redirecting the spiritual energy of two lesser dragon spiritual veins to feed into the array along with over 30 high-grade spirit mines, along with several dozen top tier monarch grade materials and even one that was close to reaching the ascendant grade. Only then was the array woken up from dormancy but even then it operated at 70% capacity, and its output has been deteriorating every millenia.

They did try to invite several well-renowned blue-grade formation masters to try and repair or even stop the decline but none of them could. The rune work, the array composition, and everything that surrounded the Ebony Twilight Sanctuary Array was something they had never seen. The formation even incorporated other schools of cultivation and wasn't purely arrays. It had inscriptions that were tied to alchemy, artifact refinement, and even ancient languages that seemed to belong to the tree folk race.

For them to even have a remote chance of slowing down the decline, the Deer Mountain Kingdom needed to hire the services of experts skilled in all of those schools, and considering the degree of difficulty, they all had to be at the gold grade.

The kingdom could barely afford the blue grade formation masters they hired let alone have the connections or resources to hire a single gold grade formation master.

Their only hope was to try and foster their own before the formation array completely collapsed but what were the odds of fostering a gold-grade formation master, a gold-grade alchemist, a gold-grade artificer, and someone knowledgeable and skilled enough with a language that belonged to a descendant of the ancient races?

Worse was the more the array was used, the faster it declined. After the previous attacks on their kingdom that even managed to touch the capital, the array had declined considerably and could now be operational at 40% capacity, and one of the lesser dragon spiritual veins was already showing signs of irrevocable depletion.

If the two obsidian serpents decided to attack them nonstop without stopping, they would only be able to hold out for five years before the array completely collapsed, but if the fire adler bear joined in after it broke through to the domain realm, the king wasn't sure the array would be able to last for more than three months. Their only hope now was to plead for the Order's intervention.

The king despite his calm exterior felt like he was standing at the edge of a precipice. The array that protected them since the beginning was about to leave them when their foes were just increasing in numbers and power, and he even had to constantly deal with the internal disputes. The aristocratic families constantly eyeing his seat.

On more than one occasion he had even entertained the thought of abdicating it if it would reunite the kingdom, but who of the five peak clans would willingly bow the head to the other?

The Zhang family who had been their constant ally became neutral when he refused to make Zhang Quifen the queen or officially name her son the crown prince. It wasn't that he didn't want to but he owed the Queen Huo Mei too much.

Had she been born into a different kingdom, she would have been the most dazzling star. Her talent in cultivation was among the best he had ever seen and even a rank 2 sect had once invited her but she declined so she could remain and serve the kingdom. She constantly made sacrifices on behalf of the kingdom, and even when he asked her to be his queen, she refused and opted to be a consort or even an unnamed companion to lessen his burden. He only got her to agree when he vowed he would abdicate his title as the crown prince if she refused to be the queen.

He couldn't help but sigh at his youthful wistfulness from back then.