Daily life of a cultivation judge

Yang Qing took out the map in the study of the branch chief and correlated it with the information Meifeng shared with him on the locations that the fire adler bear frequented with the daughter of the obsidian serpents when she was young.

Yang Qing marked out those locations and tried to see if there was anything of note written about them in some of the previous branch chief's notes on the locations around the Deer Mountain Range.

The locations didn't have any information recorded. Yang Qing decided he would visit those locations the following day and even if there were notes made, he still would have had to visit those locations in case there were any clues to be found there.

After he was done, he closed his eyes to replay all the information he had acquired on the attack.

Whether it was the information Meifeng shared or the information he dug at the battleground with the help of the crystal spring tree.

"I still have to make time to see Spring too over the next few days and help it lay its foundations on the golden earth luminescence resurgence art.." Yang Qing muttered with a sigh as he pictured how packed his schedule had become.

He thought he would get to kick back as a branch chief but the list of things he should do seemed to be growing by the second.

He hurriedly pushed away those ominous thoughts otherwise he would have to face the grim reality that the Order had already successfully converted him into a pious worker bee.

His current growing workload was something he had done to himself and that thought was too scary for him to indulge. His only solution right now was to avoid thinking about it by engrossing himself in said work and eating every hour of every chance he got at the Order's dime as his consolation that there was still a defiant bee in him who hadn't yet fallen to the wily charms of the Order.

His plan of burying the thought in his work went perfectly as within seconds he was completely enthralled in it to think about anything else.

He correlated and checked every single piece of information that came to mind, from the spread-out of the organizations within Deer Mountain Range with special attention to those who lived close to the areas the daughter of the obsidian serpent frequented with the fire adler bear, and the area she resided at.

He looked into the records of their background, who they had alliances or close relationships with, who they did not, how long they had settled in the Deer Mountain Range; and their history before they settled moved into the Deer Mountain Range. Was there a special reason they moved there? their relations before moving to the Deer Mountain Range; did they have a close relationship with anyone from the Deer Mountain Kingdom? If so who?

The Deer Mountain Kingdom received the same level of attention.

Yang Qing still operated on the notion that the Blue Soul Flame Crow Syndicate had to have some help to track the habits or know of the daughter of the obsidian couple and discover whatever special thing the fire adler bear did to her.

Those who could share that information the primary culprit would be the Deer Mountain Kingdom, followed by the other organizations or a collusion of both.

Of course, he also entertained another train of thought which was that maybe there was no traitor and this was something the Blue Soul Flame Crow Syndicate had discovered either coincidentally or something they had put in the works for quite some time, waiting for the opportune time to harvest it.

Either of these options was entirely feasible. Heinous organizations like theirs were the best at subterfuge and blending in otherwise they wouldn't have survived as long as they did.

The Dark Helminth Ghost Sect already had its fangs in the territory of the Spiritual Temperance Sect which was just a few kilometers over (a couple of tens of thousands) from the Deer Mountain Range, so it wouldn't be that strange that one of the allied factions would be close by, especially in a place that had a branch of the Order, and maybe in the course of keeping an eye on the branch's movements they stumbled onto the daughter of the obsidian serpent and discovered what was special about her and lay out the plan to ambush her.

The other was that the Blue Soul Flame Soul Syndicate discovered something special with the daughter back when the fire adler bear did whatever he did to her and have been keeping tabs on her ever since, waiting for her to ripen until she was ready to be harvested, which in this case as per what the evidence showed was her transformation into a flood dragon.

"If things happened this way, then they would have likely been watching her for years on end, which would give them enough time to create a foolproof measure of how to effortlessly subdue her and harvest her.

I'll need to ask Meifeng how far back the fire adler bear bragged about helping the couple and their daughter," said Yang Qing as he rubbed his chin while poring through other information with the hopes that the foggy mist would start parting revealing bit by bit of what lay underneath.

Organizations such as the Blue Soul Flame Crow Syndicate knew how to cover their tracks well, and if he hoped to catch traces of them he needed to go through this laborious and circuitous process that led to him going through reports and rumors that dated back almost 1,000 years in the hopes there would be something there.

Hours quickly flew by with the constant mutterings of Yang Qing and the shuffling of paper and talismans being the only sounds that echoed in the room.

But soon another sound came by, a roaring sound like that of a starved primordial beast. Yang Qing's stomach grumbled alerting him of his famished state which could not be ignored.

Mysteries and foggy clues be damned, Yang Qing heeded his true calling and quickly went to the kitchen for his scheduled meal.

After he had his fill Yang Qing was in no mood to return back to the study and thus went on a little excursion to the former territory of the now-defunct Clear River Sword Sect territory to pick up the three would-be comrades and roommates of Meifeng.